Electronic Book Review - contemporaryhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/tags/contemporary
enBeing Inside the Sentencehttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/subsyntactic
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<div class="field-item even">Gregg Biglieri</div>
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<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2004-08-22</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>At the end of the course on American Literature I taught this past spring, I had students read and write responses to Joseph McElroy’s <em><strong>9/11 Emerging</strong></em><strong></strong>. We had read Stein, Pynchon, and Robert Smithson, so students had definitely developed either a taste for, or an aversion to, writing that addresses its own process in the process of its composition. In discussing these works I prodded students by pointing out that the main characters were the <span class="lightEmphasis">written</span> characters. My overarching desire was to stress to them how the action takes place <span class="lightEmphasis">in</span> language, and that they must pay attention to how the syntax of sentences expresses the thoughts exploring the mineshafts of the mind. That is, unless a writer changes the sentence patterns, he is forced to write along tracks already laid down; and then his thoughts will conform to familiar structures, rather than forge new structures and make <span class="lightEmphasis">new</span> sentences.</p>
<p>I sent some of their responses on to McElroy, and his comments, in turn, became the genesis of this piece that you are about to read. In an e-mail McElroy wrote:</p>
<p class="longQuotation" style="padding-left: 30px;">However, looking again at the passages from yr students’ work you kindly sent me, I’m struck by the stress on the alleged “chaos” of McElroy’s thoughts in that essay. As material for essay, yes; as thrust, I don’t think so. <span class="lightEmphasis">What do you make of your experience</span>? This is the question that is central from the beginning. What I try to make of it; versus, e.g., what <span class="lightEmphasis">Atta</span> et al make of theirs. Then buildings and architecture - building - art - thought vs. prejudice - Serra - me and my family. It may be that the young are all too eager to grab onto what seems chaotic in texture, or to a statement <span class="lightEmphasis">about</span> something seemingly disorderly, and bypass other statements that clearly stress a theme that <span class="lightEmphasis">makes</span> something of the disorder. What about that as a thought? I mention it only as a sociologist continuing to parse the thinking of those around me.</p>
<p>Early in the semester, some of the students had said that they felt Stein was in their heads as they read. Yes, I said, yes. And McElroy is like Stein. His work de-emphasizes, accentuates, amplifies, and mutes the sounds inside sentences. The prose is phonically impelled. You hear not what wasn’t there before but precisely what was there, though you hadn’t been aware of it at the time. You listen and participate in the remix inside your own head. By the end of the course, my best students had realized that they could make something of their own fragmentary, disorderly experiences, and that the process of composition could transform what appeared to be chaotic into what Robert Duncan has called “a made place.”</p>
<p>Lately I have been thinking of how Pynchon’s sentences begin with an unfurling, a whip-cast like a fly fisher:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Cammed each night out of that safe furrow the bulk of this city’s waking each sunrise again set virtuously to plowing, what rich soils had he turned, what concentric planets uncovered? What voices overheard, flinders of luminescent gods glimpsed among the wallpaper’s stained foliage, candlestubs lit to rotate in the air over him, prefiguring the cigarette he or a friend must fall asleep someday smoking, thus to end among the flaming, secret salts held all those years by the insatiable stuffing of a mattress that could keep vestiges of every nightmare sweat, helpless overflowing bladder, viciously, tearfully consummated wet dream, like the memory bank to a computer of the lost? (<span class="booktitle">The Crying of Lot 49</span> 102)</p>
<p>“Cammed” sets the sentence in motion as if “to transform rotary motion into linear motion or vice versa.” One paradox of this style is that the apparent openness of the sentences’ unreeling simultaneously holds something back in a kind of secretive unspooling. This initiates a dialectic between a hidden message and pure speculation, framed by the subjunctive tenor of his extended similes. Pynchon’s commas serve to mark each crest of clause like waves that carry the reader further from the initial curl. The sentences seem to begin with a backward gesture; as if already pulling back from what they will eventually extend, offering the reader unspooling threads, increasing in slack as these threads never seem to reconnect at the other end. In contrast, McElroy’s sentences work inward, and qualify through apposition, so that the further one reads into them the further in one is - the further inside them one burrows. The qualifications are not evasions but complications. McElroy’s sentences work progressively inward, tightening and becoming increasingly compact, coiling like springs. They are labyrinthine; they are the threads that lead one out of, and back into, their complexity. Here the secret is not some other message hidden in the words, but located in the syntax, the transit back and forth between the beginning and end of the sentence. Pynchon’s sentences lead you further away from where they started, whereas McElroy’s lead you further in.</p>
<p>There are times I realize that most people don’t think enough about how others might be thinking their own stories through their own peculiar plottings. Perhaps an example from <span class="booktitle">Actress in the House</span> might show what I mean: “Telling so that over him came a chill of overtaking on its way elsewhere no doubt” (370). This is not the normal route that syntax takes: one would expect something like “a chill came over him;” and the repetition of “over” in “overtaking” makes the reader pause as if overtaken by the syntax itself until he takes possession of his own sense of what this sentence means precisely by attending to its unexpected syntax. Shifts in syntax shift thought; syntax forges the transition between anticipation and retrospect as it catches itself and is caught in the act of writing. “[O]ver him came a chill”: passive subject followed by active “overtaking” that is the “telling.” The telling itself is the active agent. Which is the telling? At any rate, “telling” is in the “subject” position and telling demands an object or someone who is told, someone who listens. That “chill” that comes “over him” places him (Daley) in the position of the prey, as if beneath the approaching wings and talons of an osprey, as will become clearer in the context of this novel and in this essay. This sentence does not fling itself out into space; rather it immediately interrupts itself. It seems that there is an invisible period after “Telling” that emphasizes this word and retools this action so integral to the theme of this novel and makes it, regardless of rules of grammar, the subject of the sentence. For McElroy, one might say, shifting slightly Blake’s apt phrasing from “The Mental Traveller,” that the “I” altering alters all.</p>
<p>Reading McElroy one begins to climb inside the main frame of the sentence, inside its circulatory or nervous system, where “nervous” is not only a descriptor but also a perceptible qualification. Think about veining / marbling inside a cave: McElroy’s microcosmic, mineral scrawl mapping increasingly deeper interiorities as opposed to Pynchon’s cosmic star mapping of the stelliscript etched across the “vault of the heavens.” The sense of burrowing and digging in, tracing the veins in relation to Keats’ “load every rift with ore.” But here the reader follows the lines and blind leads of a syntax that defines patterns recursively and as a matter of palimpsestual depth. Focus on the interlacing of cause and effect because they correspond in a strange bilaterally fearless symmetry: causes create effects, which in turn effectively create causes. The plot of <span class="booktitle">Actress in the House</span> seems to ramify from a single cause (a slap) and yet as it unfolds one gets the feeling that the consequences have been determining the action from the beginning (ab ovo). As if, were we to examine more closely what we believe to be the initial cause, the prime mover of the action, we would discover instead the monogram of consequence inscribed in its nucleus.</p>
<p>The sound of McElroy’s syntax keeps corkscrewing in your ears, even as its implications, once you get a feel for the reverberating waves of the tuning fork, widen and expand in concentric circles. The zigzag trajectories of the sentences belie an intricate crisscross over similar territory, like transversals that cut across strata. Lacework webs connect across an interior distance; and these webs are not some form of superfluous embroidery but rather are trammeled and tense, curiously reminding you of the dictionary depiction of an axon cell; a kind of vibratory starfish, each point a live wire to whip, parse and pass on a chain of sensations. Or perhaps it’s more like the lacewing, an insect with “lacelike wing venation… and often brilliant eyes.” The key being that the tracery is integral to its function. Mind those veins.</p>
<p>This is not a Pynchonesque stelliscript, but rather a form skiagraphy. The hieroglyph not as picture writing to be deciphered but instead a writing that one needs to <span class="lightEmphasis">cipher in</span>, to move along its contours and explore meaning as it inheres in the material: the interior hieroglyphs of the body, brain, and the entire “neural neighborhood.” I am drawn to the double sense of <span class="lightEmphasis">mine</span> in this mining metaphor. It reminds me of Shakespeare’s line from “The Phoenix and the Turtle” - “Neither was the other’s mine” - which I always read as pronoun rather than noun. Mine those veins for ore (yours).</p>
<p>Part of the reason it feels as if you are in the writer’s head, or in someone else’s head, as you read McElroy’s <span class="booktitle">Actress in the House</span>, is that you have to reconstruct the sense of each sentence in your own mind: you have to make sense of it, you have to make it, you have to make it make sense. Inside the sentence. Curious that this very activity that is of your own doing is what makes you feel as if you were in someone else’s head. But you are trying to make sense of a writer’s words, of the characters, of the letters and the grammar of the sentences, which are sometimes as long as a paragraph. The activity of putting it all together in your own head, making sense of it, makes you move through the writer’s experience as the one who first put these words together in this order (disorder?) and so the process of understanding these words in sequence even when it seems that they are non sequiturs, this process of following along is a kind of tracing or retracing the routes these sentences take and have taken and making or trying to make sense of how they were made in order to see what they mean. Not what is it all about, but what does each particular sentence mean and why was it written in this way, leading toward what end and following what kind of autotelic logic in order to reproduce a kind of thinking which is an activity linking both reading and writing. Putting things together - making sense. Making sense period. Full stop. Next sentence. Losing track of whose head you’re in even as you are following along these grooves or tracks that are sentences. You have been addressed. You’ve been briefed. You have been sentenced to follow the rules of another; or, has the sentence allowed you to imagine how others might think and thus have you been sentenced to get outside of yourself, outside of your own preestablished grooves and sentence patterns? McElroy doesn’t think for us. Perhaps it frustrates readers to have to struggle <span class="lightEmphasis">with</span> a writer who thinks <span class="lightEmphasis">through</span> them.</p>
<p>You read <span class="lightEmphasis">into</span> McElroy’s sentences as you look them over. Don’t overlook them or they will overlook you. Read into them and think in them as they go inside you, dig in and excavate the craters and pocks of your brain an actual place different from the mind or consciousness. A place where sentences are made, circuits connected, links established. The distance between listening and hearing / understanding (<span class="lightEmphasis">entendre</span>). The moons in your mind, the dark sides. The descriptions are first inscriptions. The mind is a “made place,” a book in which the sentences are telephonic listings to which we listen in. Listen in on. Overhear another’s thinking, thought patterns, beta waves, as one brain waves goodbye to another. Overhead we overhear that “chill of overtaking” that stops us dead in our tracks, so that we have to shift to really take it in, inside our own heads, hear what comes inside us here. These are the chemicals we walk on the paths that are leading us out of ourselves and into another place. And we listen in. Perhaps these messages are meant for us to hear and we realize this when we understand what they are telling us. Are we the ones for whom these sentences toll? The telling for whom these senses tell? What, pray tell, are they telling us? Can we pick up on a “tell,” a tic, a nervous anagram inscribed in the texture of the sentences? They are definitely saying something but do they have something to <span class="lightEmphasis">tell</span> us too rather than just picking up on the tics and turns of their own (our own) syntactic idiosyncrasies? We have to listen in. Turn to and toward the other. Station-to-station. As readers, we have to train ourselves to be trains of thought, vehicles appearing momentarily a bit more visible than the figments of one’s imagination. Now what you’re hearing is this. Does it make sense? And we are back to the sentence itself, inside it. Inside the sentence. But the sentence has many sides and we have to decide which side to look at, dig in, and follow through. As the aim of the pitch is directed by the follow-through and what has happened is answered by an action and what happens after the pitch throws the action back into question. So that “what happens” becomes “what happened?” As readers we will come to know something only after having read through the sentence, having been in there (<span class="lightEmphasis">in the shit</span>), in the process of <span class="lightEmphasis">poiesis</span>, the activity of making. We’ll know what it means by tracing the means. You are the one who has been addressed not me. I haven’t been the one. You are. You are the one who is. You are the one who has been listening and you heard what was not your own or mine but was meant for you to hear as to another story. The simple verbs let us in without getting in the way. You means you. It also means “me” when spoken out loud to one’s self. Who are you to tell me what I think about you?</p>
<p class="longQuotation">He could leave, he had places to go in this very house or in another house, he didn’t need to be used as she knew how to not only have the last word quite subtly in this making of her life, her way, but make you deliver it; or turn it into you… (317)</p>
<p>Equal as in crosswise, some myth about the frog just remembered from Sarah Kofman’s <strong><em><span class="booktitle">The Camera Obscura of Ideology</span></em></strong>, a reference to the frog’s-eye view: from the bottom, eye level to the water, multidimensional, neither hierarchic nor some higher art kick. Is what is partial to names, or just hinting at a way of following through? It just happens to be what comes out like this, over and above the definitions. What’s left for us - an ecology of echoes, of rogue quotations, taking those words and epithets and inverting them, putting them to use against the ways they would “captive” the imagination (Stevens), a negative captivation as the coercive underside of negative capability. The wind can be a window clear enough when it shows through, not a closet of inhibitions but a camera obscura, a place to exhibit pictures piercing the inside through a single pin of light, the outside-in of imagination as opposed to the inside-out. When it turns itself inside out then the imagination can take effect in the world, constructed of views and schemes never neutral, always susceptible to the cranky insistence of inertia. The sinister wink of the partial that has a ring to it, that rhymes with our occluded sense of things even when we know it’s only partial, or even wrong, working on it to work against it, to make something else of it, not more durable but springy, tensile, elastic. Draft back at what springs, at what springs back, as what bounces back against the springs, against the giant of gravity. A rebound that calls attention to the screen on which you view what is taking place, and yet the screen or blocking-out preceded the rebound. There is a sense that what’s first arises out of this secondhand, ” <span class="lightEmphasis">off</span> hand” version of showing and telling.</p>
<p>With McElroy there must not be a single beginning but a sense of incipient webbing and a reciprocal sense that the narrative that begins to cohere around the telling is already beginning to come apart through an increasing number of partial versions. He’s pulling at the threads (those sentences) that hold the book together, not to create havoc but to tweak order, threads of the story that one lives in for the telling, recounting events that don’t add up to a particular view, a single dominant perspective. Why even in saying things we hold things back, or tell different versions of events to different people. What we tell ourselves of ourselves isn’t necessarily what we write about to others, or we shade it so that what comes out is screened not to deflect but as the very condition of the possibility of expression because we can never say it all and writing incorporates the cracks and gaps and is not just mortal mortar. McElroy’s sentences secrete the glue of this interstitial abandon.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">The abalone protein cement breaks little by little, like tiny knots or gatherings stuck together that pull out or break here and there along the length, as if it were a string. How to create materials like this in the lab. (430)</p>
<p>The connections must be made by other active consciousnesses, readers working through the lines and thinking of pages their eyes have already passed over, thinking backward, thinking of the backs of words, the sides they don’t show on initial viewing, scraps that hover in the mind like falling bodies waiting perhaps for the same helicopter that dropped them (or from which they were pushed) to come back and pick them up, to rescue them from their spots, to pickpocket a bit of history from the previously pickproof - the unforeseeable. Where they fell and where they would be airlifted from, airlifted out of to a place where something can be made of them, a “made place,” part of (as in Stein) the making of the mind before one’s mind is made up.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">To tell it all in a sentence is not what I wish to do I wish to tell it all in a sentence what they make it do. (<span class="booktitle">How to Write</span> 130)</p>
<p>I can see how it’s done, copy that action in a way that seems prepared, as I am doing now. Someone must have been looking, looking out, paying attention to the details, a novelist like Joseph McElroy trying to get it right. Here the actions are copied so as to cause a slight distortion in the ripple effect of quotation (the telling), to make them seem the same, to work up against in order to work out slight changes in the routine that might disrupt the pattern even though the pattern itself as cited might just turn out to be the cause and not the effect.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">“ ‘You’re not being. You’re being told. It’s a relief passing it on,’ said Becca, ‘I’m the hinge.’” (379)</p>
<p>Who’s telling whom? Perhaps the story that is not being told is the story. Or, the story is in the telling. Ultimately, the story is telling because it tells itself. “She was a secretly oiled hinge among men” (404). Doubtless many hinges between stories and storytellers, eyewitnesses and those who are not-hearing, the rightness of it, truth or history (how it’s told and by whom), perhaps at a deposition, what brings us up to speed when all is said and done - [is] the telling. The Zen surface of it: “You’re not being.” Something will circle back to fill out what appears to be empty and waiting for something not to happen but to be told: “Circling this prospect, was the prospect of Daley too, it all stood waiting, somehow empty, for a voice to come and turn the statues into people or good solid furniture, tables and chairs” (385). You’re not the one who is doing the telling, you don’t control the action as you didn’t in the actual experience either - who did you think you were and who do you think you are in the elapsing swing at the moment of the telling, the hinge of memory’s screen door, the retelling, the counting and recounting of details that make up the tale as if some prearranged arithmetic, actively smudging out some stray numbers with your fingers for lack of a better eraser like forgetting.</p>
<p>Note the apparent circularity of the syntax as McElroy marks what would remain unmarked, to speak an insistent whisper into the ear of those who would perhaps rather forget: “Unthinkable things, yet not if we remember to ask or just repeat what we know, or dream of knowing. Events not at all unspeakable if we’ll remember to speak if only to speak in order to remember them” (319). “You’re being told.” You’re the one who needs to listen to it from someone else. You’re the passive one now, the passive observer, and the patient listener. The story has served you well, but now you’re being served a summons intended simply for someone, for <span class="lightEmphasis">one</span> quite possibly <span class="lightEmphasis">not</span> you. It changes who you are, this shift in the experience, in the retelling of the experience. Now you’re being used as in the telling you thought to take control of a situation in which you had been used, so similar to Becca’s own story and her one-act play, a way of managing her material, of making something of it so that it’s not “senseless repetition” (361). How do you like me now? How you are like me now. “It’s a relief passing it on,” said Becca, “I’m the hinge.” How the writer (storyteller) is being read by one of his readers (listeners). Now, “you’re being told.” You’re <span class="lightEmphasis">being</span> told, not your fortune. Now the writer is listening to one who has listened in to his narrative. “And was he the circles downward, inward? He couldn’t tell and wouldn’t but would take stock in the morning when Becca was leaving, for this was the point of her telling his story to him, wasn’t it?” (385). It’s still just a story, yes, but now you’re the one being (“You’re not being. You’re being told.”) weighed in the balance of reciprocal generosities and compensatory actions. “It did not occupy him as he went to sleep, only a thought that action, of which he had supplied little, is always compensatory, but he couldn’t work it out” (385).</p>
<p>Note it plainly, note it being toward what it is - a hinge - a kind of dovetail, tongue-and-groove. How we make what it is without meaning (intending) it to be. What we make of it not meaning but part of what it is to be and to exist, a breathing. A sense of gravity a certain notion of falling, of falling bodies, of suspension and suspension bridges, hovering over the earth, between things, a way of listening, a way to “uphold” one’s end of the story and not a weightlessness, trying to make it into something, to hold weight, feel its gravitational pull, the story - Lucretian atoms colliding and swerving as they fall. Disorder and chaos, what’s left behind after leaving pulls out (but “Leaving let you see” [272]), an empty suction to reconcile the opposing pressures, writing it down till it becomes thick in the pages of a notebook, a cumulus cloud, gathered knots of collision strung out and together in lines, hung to dry as duplicates airing out and aired out by experience. A sequence of helicopters - Osprey, Kiowa, Alouette.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">She [Becca] was not prey so much as used for another’s experience and doesn’t even need to be told not to tell, it’s between us, or, now she’s with Daley, none of their business. It wasn’t so bad. She’s here to turn it into something. (197)</p>
<p>If prey could speak, what, pray tell, would they tell? To turn what happened to you into something you can tell; to change from passive prey into an act of prayer - neither preyed upon nor preying upon, but something in between, an osprey.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">He hardly knew what he’d told her all jumbled together. Helicopter passed overhead picking up, depositing, almost miraculously maneuverable but not quite. Imagine the projected Osprey lifting like a copter only to flip its two experimental wing engines forward and pass on at speed like a plane. To lift straight up. To hover. To flip the motors and take off in midair. Was this what they had been talking about? (272- 3)</p>
<p class="longQuotation">… for who caresses her in the checkout line? Who tempts her to eat by bringing her a jam sandwich in from the kitchen by plane, that pauses over her - really a helicopter, really this new one that’s a plane and a helicopter, Daley saw the fish hawk its named for migrating once high above Ohio of all places, its black wrist, its crook’d wing - till the jam sandwich (chopper in the area!) suddenly descends straight for her plate - who is this osprey in the house? (190)</p>
<p>Actress as osprey in the house? Osprey, from Latin <span class="lightEmphasis">ossifraga</span>, bird of prey. And yet, if it’s all about the telling then the action is what passes through a series of mouths - mouths that both eat and speak. The first definition of Latin <span class="lightEmphasis">os</span> is bone; the second is mouth or orifice. Let os-prey: that we might come to understand and come to an understanding; that we might leave our readerly apprehensions behind and move from prehension [Latin <span class="lightEmphasis">prehendere</span> to grasp, to seize] toward comprehension, that we might enter the place where the raptor turns into rapture.</p>
<p>Reading McElroy’s <span class="booktitle">Actress in the House</span> feels like being five days stuck inside a light swing struck by the sight of a swan I once saw that had been sawn down and whittled into shape. I forget what it was made of if not made up. I don’t care about swans because I was one, made one, and saw one come up as some letters on a page glide past on a duplicated lake. Which is in my mind now and which is not. The prose too swift to linger on any but the slightest of semi-colons, dashed against the rocks, precipitous and aloud as rushing headlong out of a helicopter, a Hotspur out of the Pleistocene, Kleist at a shove killed knowing as a cause. Art’s physics, <span class="lightEmphasis">hypocrite lecteur</span>, or hypograms, hypnotic escapades, icy night’s quiet not quite midsummer’s dream beacons lit upon some neck and a mightily thinning mind. The prose ache more a darting differs when it’s dealt down the pipe rather than ridged and cornering, the unsuspecting horseman turns. The house returns. The words themselves are circling us and because they are circles they must circle back to catch their own tales.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Daley heard it coming and he was not surprised except at the very words he had heard coming, they must be circulating because he had thought these words himself, the very ones. (268)</p>
<p>You’ve become too like that so that like that you too have become - but what? You’ve imitated what is not there in the air for you to know. Who is this “we”? Like readers writing and writers reading. Who are you that I am this? What are you looking forward to, what are you looking back on, remembering to think about something else? Who are you to be that way when something’s happening here, now that the other places are empty you might be able to use the night out there.</p>
<p>Daley would regret what little he had told Lotta in a weak moment, but it wasn’t a weak moment. Tonight and tomorrow he would regret it, he would be thinking, What did I tell her?</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Why did <span class="lightEmphasis">you</span> need someone to tell your stuff to? Or to tell you your stuff? Why do we tell the people we tell? (271)</p>
<p>Silent musicals. Bodies immobile. Who are you when you’re stripped of all those other interconnected “me’s” dotting the globe like floaters in your eye? Have you been through this and are you through now? Now that you are through with it, finished, it comes back to use you because it’s not through with you yet.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">A teacher she had wanted to please in high school who used to say in Homer you enter a foreign country and tell them your family history, genealogy, all that, but you look first for the right person to tell. (311)</p>
<p>The hinge is a turning point, a way of writing at the edge of legibility between an eligible bachelor and an illegible bastard. A hinny: a hybrid between a stallion and a female donkey. An osprey, both a fish hawk and a helicopter. An Osprey itself is a hybrid, both a plane and a helicopter and available for multiple uses. How will it be used? How will you use it? To make use of something, make something of what’s already there as an architect uses materials: “an architect took action and made something that joined what had already been made but that did not itself have knowledge of…” (394). To join as with a hinge, to hint and hinder as a hinge can open doors to “knowledge of” or close them upon forgetting. Traveling up the neck and knowing that it ends there, just there before the mind, or on the threshold, a “jolt,” a snap, a slap between friends, a synapse between previously unconnected axon cells. These sentences aim for what is lit against a background of litigants. Can you hear me <span class="lightEmphasis">know</span>? Are you listening? Being told. Are you the right reader for this tale?</p>
<p class="longQuotation">You must find the right people to tell your things to. (301)</p>
<p>Who knows what all this means? That’s not a question but it is a sentence. Something to hang your hat on. Putting two things together to get something new, something else, a sum, some others, some <span class="lightEmphasis">you’s</span> to sing through me and use me as I use them. I - You - Them. Who is this “we”? Can it be constructed out of two <span class="lightEmphasis">you’s</span>, out of “to use” in the infinitive, out of you and me, “but that did not itself have knowledge of you, for if it did you would be a god” (403).</p>
<p>Lest we imagine that this “telling” has been abstracted to a merely conceptual level, we should note that McElroy always returns readers to the minute particulars of the everyday (Daley?). For instance, even in a short trip across town a story is exchanged between Daley and a cab driver: “ ‘So what do I think?’ she said, looking in the mirror. ‘She was expecting, but that wasn’t what she had to tell you’ ” (278). The fact that Daley has told the driver about a woman he had gone home with and found out that she was pregnant adds another dimension to the word “expecting,” rooting the sense of anticipation inherent in any storytelling in the coming to term, the birth of an event. But just as “that wasn’t what she had to tell you,” there’s more to be gathered from this exchange than meets the eye; or it’s precisely what meets the eye that needs to be revealed. The cab driver makes this comment while looking in the mirror. We hear what she thinks by looking at her eyes framed in the rearview mirror. Her eyes tell us what she thinks but what we hear is not what she has to tell us. We always look at ourselves in the mirror, so that the visual dimension seems to lead toward narcissism. But the aural dimension is more about absorption, and even self-absorption implies that one has <span class="lightEmphasis">absorbed</span> something from outside oneself, from one’s surroundings. A four-year old girl pointed to a picture she’d drawn of herself under which she’d written “me.” I asked her how that picture could be her (“me”) when it was, I said as I pointed at her, “you.” In the balance of McElroy’s narrative the eyes (I’s) always shift their focus to the <span class="lightEmphasis">you’s</span>.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">“It’s you,” exclaimed this nameless voice, this person unknown to Daley - did she have the wrong number? Who did she think she was? (20)</p>
<p><span class="lightEmphasis">It’s you</span>: these are the first words that Becca uses to address Daley directly. Although he had seen her acting in the play the previous night and thus had already heard her voice, he hasn’t yet spoken with her. So their first contact is from mouth to ear via the telephone. Perhaps it’s not <span class="lightEmphasis">about</span> you, but <span class="lightEmphasis">it’s you</span>, nonetheless. And this is not just some simple phrase (in fact it’s a complete sentence), but it will take on all the characteristics of a secret, italicized chain letter, carried on by all those names that come to fill out the contours of this capacious pronoun.</p>
<p class="longQuotation"><span class="lightEmphasis">It’s you, it’s always you. It’s you after all</span>, she had said coming tonight from her brother. (284)</p>
<p>Perhaps one needs to be preternaturally attentive in order to hear the significance secreted through these abstract shifters like “you.” Someone like the drummer Sid Knox, who acts as a surrogate for the novelist himself, and who has the ability not only to hear but to listen in order to become aware by discovering the latent circuits of awareness, how we put the things we pick up on together.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">You never knew what the drummer Sid Knox might say. […] Knox a drummer whose hearing (as is sometimes true of the dying or predying) grew more acute as the rest of him broke down… while by the day, by the hour, he heard better and better from apparently simultaneously different directions, all the time, and not just music… but people, individuals talking… Sid recognized her, Daley could have sworn, though his <span class="lightEmphasis">It’s you</span> was maybe flirting around with her. (286)</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Bent and thin and shaking his head, Sid Knox turned abruptly and Daley realized the <span class="lightEmphasis">It’s</span> you he’d greeted Becca with was what Sid had heard coming out of the phone from her to Daley Monday and why Sid had gotten up to go then, as if his disappearing out the back door onto the pier now, just as Daley had a dumb question to ask, were for some similar reason probably no more than mortal. (287)</p>
<p>Here is an exemplary case of what it’s like to be in the head of the novelist as we trace the trajectories inside this sentence. That is, we can follow the action by attending to the shifting <span class="lightEmphasis">subjects</span> in this sentence: (1) Sid Knox turned abruptly and (2) Daley realized (3) the <span class="lightEmphasis">It’s you</span> he’d [Sid] greeted Becca with was (4) what Sid had heard (5) coming out of the phone (6) from her [Becca] to Daley (7) Monday and (8) why Sid had gotten up to go <span class="lightEmphasis">then</span>, (9) as if his disappearing out the back door onto the pier <span class="lightEmphasis">now</span>, (10) just as Daley had a dumb question to ask, were for some similar reason probably no more than mortal. It’s clear that between these pronominal exchanges we’ve also shifted time zones from “Monday” to “now,” so that this interconnected web extends its influence across temporal divides though remaining as tenuous as the vanishing breath of the conversation itself.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Was it a question he was being asked so the tone of voice curved back inside <span class="lightEmphasis">him</span>? She’d been doing this since that first Monday-afternoon <span class="lightEmphasis">It’s-you</span> phone call (some small danger from the get- go half question <span class="lightEmphasis">You have someone with you</span>?) (370)</p>
<p>Now it’s time to return to the beginning of Chapter Nine from the final section of the novel (First Love) in order to contextualize, and retell the story of the “telling” sentence that I excerpted at the outset of this essay.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">She was possessed of some hearsay it came to him, for Daley had had the foreglimpse, an impersonal voice awake then half asleep again but not now. (370)</p>
<p>Note the shifting temporalities of then and now, and how this “impersonal voice” recalls the “nameless voice” (20) that was Becca’s over the phone to Daley during that first call before he knew it was her, but already knew who she was.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">The woman had a name all right, his sheet anchor her life in the balance and he would wonder listening to the bizarre authority of this telling sprung on him how Becca could have known of her. The woman named Than. A thing repeating itself through this person with him for it could only have been reported to her. A report of a report. Yet that she had gotten around to it finally, through sleep even. It was no secret, it was public; but he had no call to hear such history from her, his in part. From this unknown person, and why would she tell him? (370)</p>
<p>The woman has a name, is not “nameless” (Vietnam), <span class="lightEmphasis">he</span> held <span class="lightEmphasis">her</span> life in the balance even as <span class="lightEmphasis">she</span> was <span class="lightEmphasis">his</span> “sheet anchor.” He listens to “this telling sprung on him” (“a chill of overtaking”), wondering how Becca could have known of her. There are two separate events being spliced together through the telling; two separate <span class="lightEmphasis">she’s</span> (Becca and Than) and two <span class="lightEmphasis">he’s</span>, though really the same <span class="lightEmphasis">he</span> (Daley) at two different times. “A report of a report.” Hers is not an eyewitness account, but based on hearsay. And even if a story is always already a <span class="lightEmphasis">re</span> telling, “he has no call to hear such history from her, his in part.” Daley lived through an experience that Becca is in turn recounting to him through the strange telephonic passing on of information that had been previously passed on to her through her brother. But Daley is aware that history is his only in part (“his in part”), perhaps like a part an actress plays on stage (Becca’s in part), passing through separate stages on the way toward making sense of how it has been passed on, imparted. We will never get at the real story, but we can investigate how it’s told and to whom it is addressed. “[W]hy would she tell him” his story? It’s at moments like this that one feels the tragic dimensions of this novel: the Greek sense of doom; the impersonal, nameless unknown is telling us our fate and yet we don’t have oracles to interpret the meaning for us, only our everyday interlocutors, recirculating stories through our own auricles, listening to <span class="lightEmphasis">auricular</span> confessions - something told privately and understood or recognized by the sense of hearing.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Telling so that over him came a chill of overtaking on its way elsewhere no doubt. (370)</p>
<p>The reason the senses come back to haunt you is not simply because they are repeated and seem to come back to hunt you. Presumably fixed in the relation of prey to preyer, the roles of reader and writer reverse their ratios. McElroy’s sentences come back to haunt you and come back to hunt you precisely because the experience of reading them forces you to hunt for their senses and build your own haunts inside them.</p>
<p>Perhaps you hope I will quote my <span class="lightEmphasis">self</span> below, thus describing my experience of <span class="lightEmphasis">reading</span> as well: “I’m aware of a bit of give and wander and the need for a `return’ to a central focus. It’s almost as if I wrote this on the inside curl of the wave, that tubular hollow that surfers speak about.” Even if it hasn’t seemed to be the case, this essay has been all about you. You are the hinge. It’s up to you to make something of it. Tell yourself a story. Get inside your own sentence. Make it happen.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">You took away from experience what was worth taking, the hinge swings and you are on your way, even if you are the hinge. (324)</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"> </p>
<h2>Works Cited</h2>
<p>Blake, William. <span class="booktitle">The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake</span>. New York: Doubleday, 1988.</p>
<p>Duncan, Robert. <span class="booktitle">The Opening of the Field</span>. New York: Grove Press, 1960.</p>
<p>Keats, John. <span class="booktitle">Selected Letters</span>. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.</p>
<p>Kofman, Sarah. <span class="booktitle">The Camera Obscura of Ideology</span>. Tran. Will Straw. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999.</p>
<p>Pynchon, Thomas. <span class="booktitle">The Crying of Lot 49</span>. New York: HarperPerennial, 1999.</p>
<p>Shakespeare, William. <span class="booktitle">The Complete Works of Shakespeare</span>. Ed. David Bevington. Glenview, Illinois: Scott, Foresman and Company, 1980.</p>
<p>Stein, Gertrude. <span class="booktitle">How to Write</span>. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1995.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/gregg-biglieri">Gregg Biglieri</a>, <a href="/tags/biglieri">Biglieri</a>, <a href="/tags/joseph-mcelroy">Joseph McElroy</a>, <a href="/tags/mcelroy">mcelroy</a>, <a href="/tags/syntax">syntax</a>, <a href="/tags/pynchon">pynchon</a>, <a href="/tags/american">american</a>, <a href="/tags/contemporary">contemporary</a>, <a href="/tags/fiction">fiction</a>, <a href="/tags/metaphor">metaphor</a>, <a href="/tags/sara-kofman">Sara Kofman</a>, <a href="/tags/cameraobscura">CameraObscura</a>, <a href="/tags/consciousness">consciousness</a>, <a href="/tags/repetition">repetition</a>, <a href="/tags/becca">becca</a>, <a href="/tags/daley">daley</a>, <a href="/tags/hinge">hinge</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1097 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/subsyntactic#commentsa Joseph McElroy festschrifthttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/introductory
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Andrew Walser</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2004-09-26</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>We want the works of Joseph McElroy to survive. Does that go without saying?</p>
<p><span class="lightEmphasis">To survive</span> means more than <span class="lightEmphasis">to physically persist</span>, of course - since a text can sit in an attic for centuries, or occupy a few bytes in an enormous digital database, but does not <span class="lightEmphasis">survive</span> unless someone (and not just anyone) reads it. A book is a technology for reporting the structure and contents of consciousness: without readers, the device does not work.</p>
<p>Scholars I trust say that Sophocles wrote over a hundred plays, and that their survival rate - about one in 15 - is typical for the texts of antiquity. What to conclude? That scrolls do not age well, first of all. That Plato must have had great institutional support. And, most important, that literature - like life - is a ruthless selectional system.</p>
<p>In his book <span class="booktitle">Wider Than the Sky</span>, the neuroscientist Gerald M. Edelman lists the three essential traits of any selectional system:</p>
<p>1) A means to generate “diversity in a population of elements;”</p>
<p>2) The opportunity for “extensive encounters between individuals in a variant population” and the system in question;</p>
<p>3) A way to “differentially amplify the number, survival, or influence of those elements…that happen to meet selective criteria (41-2).</p>
<p>Literature is not evolution, or the immune system, or a CNS, but it is a selectional system. (We only have debates about the canon because we know that so many works go extinct.) A novel or poem, an essay or play, a hypertext or some <span class="lightEmphasis">sui generis</span> Oulipian experiment - each enters its environment, and each has a chance to survive if it can influence the right authors, please the right critics, fit into the right curricula, or attract a mass audience. Each instant of survival calls forth a new instant of peril, and works that last must be adaptable enough to weather any change of place, time, or intellectual climate.</p>
<p>This festschrift wants to do its part to insure the survival of the writings of Joseph McElroy - from <span class="booktitle">A Smuggler’s Bible</span> (1966) to <span class="booktitle">Actress in the House</span> (2003) and beyond. It centers on an excerpt from McElroy’s work-in-progress, <a class="internal" href="/criticalecologies/resourceful"><span class="booktitle">Water Writing</span></a> , an essay that courses and meanders and makes the sort of deep dives that only a writer of polymathic knowledge and unflagging attention can pull off.</p>
<p>Around that sun - to switch metaphors - the festschrift sets a dozen satellites spinning.</p>
<p>A reader coming cold to McElroy may want to read <a class="internal" href="/criticalecologies/intimate">Tim Keane’s</a> piece first, since the author - as part of his discussion of <span class="lightEmphasis">noesis</span> in <span class="booktitle">Women and Men</span> - offers a superb overview of the oeuvre.</p>
<p>Old hands, on the other hand, can start anywhere, since these essays create a field fathomable in many ways. <a class="internal" href="/criticalecologies/centrifugal">Ian Demsky</a> reminds readers that <span class="booktitle">Ancient History: A Paraphase</span> is more than just a postmodern dot-to-dot, while <a class="internal" href="/endconstruction/afloat">Flore Chevaillier</a> looks at the way the little-known story “Canoe Repair” moves. <a class="internal" href="/criticalecologies/angling">Joseph Milazzo</a> reads <span class="booktitle">Hind’s Kidnap</span> as “an allegory about allegorical systems” - and decides, I think, that the book does <span class="lightEmphasis">not</span> decide, that it recognizes the perils of certain sorts of stories, but also insists on the need to tell them. <a class="internal" href="/criticalecologies/seeing">Salvatore Proietti</a> sets the novel <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> between two bad ideas about cyborgs - a cult of disembodiment on one hand, and a shallow humanism on the other. Stepping outside that mostly sterile debate, Proietti sees in <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> a bit of intellectual lagniappe, something extra for those who will open their minds to an orbiting mind.</p>
<p><a class="internal" href="/criticalecologies/anacoluthon">Charles Molesworth</a> inspects the projective prose of <span class="booktitle">The Letter Left to Me</span> - a tale of <span class="lightEmphasis">sparagmos</span>, I might add, that rips up one letter and remembers another. <a class="internal" href="/electropoetics/subsyntactic">Gregg Biglieri</a> shows how the words of <span class="booktitle">Actress in the House</span> burrow into each other and, consequently, into us. Three essays on <span class="booktitle">Women and Men</span> take issue with those critics who would reduce McElroy’s magnum opus to a successor to <span class="booktitle">The Recognitions</span>, a rival to <span class="booktitle">Gravity’s Rainbow</span>, or a precursor to <span class="booktitle">Underworld</span>. (Early settlers in Canada wrote of the gamboling, frolicking moose: sometimes our categories can mislead us.) In his revisionary reading, <a class="internal" href="/criticalecologies/intimate">Tim Keane</a> discovers not a mega-novel or modern epic, but a book about small-scale intimacies - a work more James than Joyce. <a class="internal" href="/criticalecologies/accretive">Paul Gleason</a> discusses the “discourses and disciplines” that McElroy has mastered and that allow him to make sense (<span class="lightEmphasis">for us</span>) of the modern world’s unnerving complexity. <a class="internal" href="/criticalecologies/primordial">Yves Abrioux</a> offers a Deleuzian take on the novel and its notion of “embodied cognition.”</p>
<p>The festschrift also features some older pieces from <span class="journaltitle">ebr</span> - McElroy’s popular essays on <a class="internal" href="/criticalecologies/volcanic">Mount St. Helens</a> and <a class="internal" href="/endconstruction/parallel">September 11th</a>, <a class="internal" href="/criticalecologies/all-over">William S. Wilson’s</a> look at field theory in <span class="booktitle">The Letter Left to Me</span>, and three reviews of <span class="booktitle">Actress in the House</span>, by <a class="internal" href="/endconstruction/topoanalytic">Steffen Hantke</a>, <a class="internal" href="/endconstruction/magpie%20mind">Alicia Miller</a>, and <a class="internal" href="/endconstruction/violent">Andrew Walser</a>.</p>
<p>How would I describe the structure of the whole enterprise?</p>
<p>“Shock and response” might be a good start. So many of McElroy’s characters are experts in converting the shock of the present into action that wills the future: think of Cartwright at the start of <span class="booktitle">Lookout Cartridge</span>, for instance, or Becca in <span class="booktitle">Actress in the House</span>, reacting to a backhanded slap that is not just theatrical. When we convert fiction to criticism, we do it to spin readers around and aim them again at the original texts.</p>
<p>“[S]omeone else’s system” (<span class="booktitle">Lookout Cartridge</span> 333) works well too. Because McElroy has inserted himself into a variety of systems and “poached on” (<span class="booktitle">Lookout Cartridge</span> 180) their powers, we readers can insert ourselves in <span class="lightEmphasis">his</span> system and extract “information” - and energy - to “take [us] into the future” (<span class="booktitle">Lookout Cartridge</span> 340).</p>
<p>For a final descriptor, consider “Resistance.”</p>
<p>You do not measure this resistance in ohms, although it might show up on an MRI. (Most readers of McElroy know that his prose seems to tinker with one’s neural connections.) Through their interruptions, their revisions, their focusings and refocusings, his sentences teach the mind to take the <span class="lightEmphasis">inherited present</span> - the one convention constructs for us - and remake it with precision and soul.</p>
<p><span class="lightEmphasis">Precision and soul</span> - the phrase belongs to Robert Musil, another cognitive realist who wrote of empire’s decline and coached readers on how to ride the downslide. Such subtle instruction insures a special sort of durability for a literary work. In 2003, the Overlook Press put out new editions of <span class="booktitle">A Smuggler’s Bible</span> and <span class="booktitle">Lookout Cartridge</span> (1974), but there is more to material persistence than such visible supports. Even if a million freak fires torched the texts, or a vigorous censor shredded them, their <span class="lightEmphasis">effects</span> would survive, and we would continue to speak of “McElroy” as a particularly useful, particularly attentive cast of mind.</p>
<p style="text-align:center">_________</p>
<h2>Works Cited</h2>
<p>Edelman, Gerald M. <span class="booktitle">Wider Than the Sky: The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness</span>. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2004.</p>
<p>McElroy, Joseph. <span class="booktitle">Lookout Cartridge</span>. Woodstock and New York: Overlook Press, 2003.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/andrew-walser">Andrew Walser</a>, <a href="/tags/walser">walser</a>, <a href="/tags/mcelroy">mcelroy</a>, <a href="/tags/joseph-mcelroy">Joseph McElroy</a>, <a href="/tags/american">american</a>, <a href="/tags/fiction">fiction</a>, <a href="/tags/contemporary">contemporary</a>, <a href="/tags/festschrift">festschrift</a>, <a href="/tags/edelman">edelman</a>, <a href="/tags/gerald-edelman">gerald edelman</a>, <a href="/tags/cognitive">cognitive</a>, <a href="/tags/field">field</a>, <a href="/tags/epic">epic</a>, <a href="/tags/musil">musil</a>, <a href="/tags/robert-musil">robert musil</a>, <a href="/tags/overlook-press">overlook press</a>, <a href="/tags/overlook">overlook</a>, <a href="/tags/cognition">cognition</a>, <a href="/tags/embodi">embodi</a>, <a href="/tags/embodiment">embodiment</a>, <a href="/tags/embodied-cogntion">embodied cogntion</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1101 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comWeight Inward into Lightness: A Reading of Canoe Repairhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/endconstruction/afloat
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Flore Chevaillier</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2004-08-19</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>“Canoe Repair” takes place at a transitional time for the main character. Zanes moves from New York City to a New Hampshire town and has to adapt to a new life and a new job, running a Laundromat, as well as to his son’s new hang-gliding activity and his wife’s new TV job. Thus, “Canoe Repair” occurs at a moment when rural and urban worlds are put in “connection and disconnection at the same time” (“Midcourse Corrections” 50). While we learn more about Zanes’ occupations, we also read a portrait of the town’s life. We discover a picture of America and its smell of “coffee richly dripping and poppy-seed-blue corn muffins” (69). We read Zanes’ discussions with “Seemyon Stitching … a spring immigrant from Byelorussia and a trained marathon runner” (62), and find out about the “president’s eight o’clock message to the nation” they listen to when “no one among the machine-users seemed to be waiting for the president’s speech” (72). The story deals with the movements of people from the town who use the Laundromat and the movements of the canoe on the lake, as well as the hang-gliding and the weather.</p>
<p>One might describe the events in these terms. But the story is also a reflection on time and on strange, everyday moments in one’s life. “Canoe Repair” presents a section of a man’s life, also a canoe’s, since its repair is at the center of the story’s multiple directions, its focus on space and movement. The story is a space where different tensions meet. It shows the strain between two worlds, two generations, between different experiences of time and perception, and between two voices telling the story. “Betweenness” is central in McElroy’s writing. In “Canoe Repair,” “ ‘Betweenness’ is… the crumbling edge of the interface of worlds, selves, and situations” (Saltzman 100). Betweenness is also at stake when we consider “Midcourse Corrections,” an unusual autobiographical interview/essay ended by “Canoe Repair.”</p>
<p>“Is a canoe too beautiful to be funny unless somebody falls out of it?” asks Joseph McElroy in “Midcourse Corrections” - “falls out, tipping it over? Put two people in it facing forward. What’s the stern paddler see? What’s the bow paddler feel? - for the stern paddler?”(42).</p>
<p>These questions about canoe uses are put into practice in McElroy’s short story, independent but part of the essay, as he explains. “Some of the material in ‘Midcourse Corrections’ could be said to turn into ‘Canoe Repair’… I wanted to use ‘Canoe Repair’ to fulfill ‘Midcourse Corrections,’ that peculiar interview memoir … that should turn into fiction at the end.” <cite id="note_1">Personal correspondence with the author, June 16, 2001.</cite></p>
<p>“Corrections” is itself an experiment in literary form that in many ways epitomizes the body of McElroy’s writing. “With its inserted interviews, its odd proportions, and its highly colored perspectives of me,” McElroy writes in a letter, “[‘Corrections’] is a hybrid fiction, I suppose. A daydream posing as a document.” (cited in Tabbi 156)</p>
<p>The thematic and structural research of this “hybrid fiction” turns into practical experience in “Canoe Repair.” The author’s reflections upon space, motion, and perception connect to the movement of the boat on water because the “canoe becomes an occasion to think.” <cite id="note_2">Personal correspondence with the author, February 6, 2003.</cite> We can approach the story from different angles due to the openness of its particular structure linking it to the essay, of which it is also the unusual closing part. Nevertheless, it would be unfair to consider the story strictly as a conclusion to “Midcourse Corrections;” it has its own structure, dynamics, and meaning. It is a complex and intense story because of the multiple tensions we can feel in its narration.</p>
<p>To understand “Canoe Repair,” we have to focus on the transient aspect of Zanes’ life and its relation to tensions that appear both thematically and structurally. The text is literally at the end of the “Midcourse Corrections” but metaphorically “in between.” It connects to “Midcourse Corrections” but is autonomous. Moreover, it plays strangely with the reader’s expectations. It is organized around a double voice that disturbs the reader’s traditional way of reading. The reading, because of structural devices that put us “in between,” becomes the experience of the transition moment Zanes goes through, his shift from one world to another, his perception of the world.</p>
<p>Zanes’ visions can sometimes be confusing. Hence, some aspects of the story can be destabilizing to the reader. The story starts with a family scene: Zanes and his son are watching the river. A strange canoe used by a black man and a blond woman catches their attention. Zanes’ neighbor calls him afterward to fix the canoe for the blond woman’s son; the canoe captures Zanes’ attention throughout the rest of the story. Parallel to Zanes’ work on the canoe, we learn about his arguments with his son regarding the latter’s hang-gliding practice. We also get to know more about the life that goes on at the Laundromat where Zanes meets with Seemyon Stytchin and a group of young punks that disturb the community. Zanes starts a friendship with Lung, a member of this group. However, this summary contradicts the story’s original presentation of Zanes’ world because it reassembles what is purposefully fragmented in “Canoe Repair.” We only achieve this vision of the story retrospectively because it is not told linearly.</p>
<p>Our expectations as readers are challenged, as David Porush notes when associating the technique of “de-automatization” provoked by the unsettling language of McElroy’s novel <span class="booktitle">Plus</span>. <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> ’ main character Imp Plus is a brain detached from its body and put in orbit to communicate with earth during a scientific experiment. When relearning ways to communicate, Imp Plus uses language unusually. Therefore, the reader is forced to see words in a different way. Imp Plus presents a new use of words that questions the systems we automatically refer to when using language. In “Canoe Repair,” the challenge to our automatisms lies in the distortions that affect the structure of the story. The compact paragraphs of “Canoe Repair” are juxtaposed without transitions. When turning to a dialogue, McElroy does not use rules of quotation to let the reader know that the viewpoint is changing. Tabbi claims that for McElroy “the mental text … does not precede the work at all but exists instead in the work, where the reader might imaginatively participate in the compositional or self-creative effort that went into the life/work’s composition” (158). The activity of the reader is thus part of the structure of the short story. Disjunction calls up the reader’s activity of representation. It asks us to create a coherent image of the narrative, a coherent text. Omitting the relation between two events leaves room for the reader to fill in the blanks. This crafted incompleteness creates the structure of “Canoe Repair.” Facts have more than one logical order; the reader coordinates elements by analyzing fragments.</p>
<p>Thus, the reader organizes the very space of the text. We shift, for example, from “When he took his canoe out, Zanes also thought,” to “The ideas knew how to get away sometimes” in the next paragraph (59). Reading “Zanes also thought,” the reader does not expect the sentence to stop at this point. S/he expects a complement to the verb “thought.” Therefore, reading “Canoe Repair” can be somewhat frustrating; the author even ironically refers to our unsatisfied expectation when we lack a transition between the two sentences. That is why, as Wolfgang Iser notes in <span class="booktitle">The Implied Reader</span>, we have to use imagination to compensate for the gaps. The context created by the sentence: “When he took his canoe out, Zanes also thought,” is destroyed so that the reader steps back and reflects upon the narrative as a work of art. “The artwork itself is represented as an artwork” (McHale 30). The reader finds metafictional allusions that suggest a fiction conscious of its fictionality, which makes the reader understand the story at another level of representation. These metafictional moments create a disjunction in addition to the fragmenting of the plot itself.</p>
<p>Each blank invites interpretation and coordination. Do the gaps become the theme of the narrative? When analyzing Modern texts such as <span class="booktitle">Ulysses</span>, Iser engages the issue of semantic richness and incoherence of gaps, moments of inconsistency, disruption, or omission. He sees reading as a process the reader undergoes to synthesize fragmented elements; the reader creates meaning.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">The unconnected allusions and the abrupt alternation of stylistic devices disclose a large number of gaps … [that give] rise to the stimulating quality of the text. On the one hand, the density of allusions and the continual segmentation of style involve an incessant changing of perspectives, which seems to go out of control whenever the reader tries to pin them down; on the other hand, the gaps resulting from the cuts and abbreviations tempt the reader to fill them in. (Iser 213)</p>
<p>The structural breaks in “Canoe Repair” might be less extreme than those in <span class="booktitle">Ulysses</span> but, similarly, the gaps and omissions become part of the story’s theme, possibly denying thematic synthesis itself. Zanes’ fragmented thinking and his way of experiencing life are present in the style the author uses. The medium is often the message. The construction of sentences that might make us insecure reminds us that reading “Canoe Repair” is a special experience that enables us to coordinate elements of the story and thus penetrate Zanes’ mind and his somewhat eccentric thinking. The reader, by grasping multiplicity, references, and rambling elements, maps out what is happening in Zanes’ mind. The way things get originally connected structurally mirrors Zanes’ experience of the world that also reaches for unusual connections.</p>
<p>How do we find our bearings reading “Canoe Repair?” The narration resists linear order. It seems laminated into different sequences of the character’s life. Flashes are exposed with neither explanation nor transition. Joseph McElroy “never hid the gaps” (“Neural Neighborhoods” 204). Chronology is not respected; events follow a pattern of shifts from one subject to another, from one point of view to another, and everything seems important and unimportant at the same time. There is sometimes no link between consecutive sentences: “Was it <span class="lightEmphasis">my</span> time device operating again?” and “A canoe is what makes you do” (77). Here, gaps interfere with our sense of the evolution of the story and the progression in the character’s life, if there is one. These gaps are caused mostly by the double narration of the story, and they are even more challenging to the reader. When we shift from, “Was it my time device operating again?” to “A canoe is what makes you do” (77), we shift from an “I” to an omniscient narrator. Zanes’ own perspective on his life is balanced by the omniscient narrator. To understand Zanes’ life, we need to be inside him and outside him. We need to know the world exterior to Zanes’ subjectivity to understand his reactions, hence the role of the omniscient voice.</p>
<p>The embedded structure of the story told by two narrators juxtaposes two sources of information. This construction enables the insertion of one perspective within another and it leads us to see Zanes’ life as an accumulation of fragments. Different perspectives provide distinct information about and approaches to the same life. Can the story be seen as a dialogue between these two poles? Unlike traditional narrations where the reader faces a set of events exposed in a linear way, “Canoe Repair” makes the reader feel the duality of life.</p>
<p>McElroy constructs a dynamic that can be paralleled with the theme of the double, often present in gothic stories. In these stories, the narrator and the character are the same person, although it is usually not clearly stated in the text. In “Canoe Repair,” there is, to some extent, a renewal of the theme of the double since our character has a double voice. The schizophrenic tensions represented by the strange vision of the double in the gothic stories appear in “Canoe Repair” in a somewhat different way. The strain between two voices can be understood as the representation of power over the development of the story.</p>
<p>First, the omniscient exterior narrator controls the story. Progressively, “I” becomes dominant. At the end, rapid shifts of viewpoint break up the story. The evolution of each viewpoint implicitly lets us gather details about the context of each narrator’s intervention. The constant shift form “I” to “he” changes the reader’s relation to the narrator because it implies a nonlinear way to gather information. Each narrator puts the reader into a frame of mind that influences interpretation. The shifting of frames makes the reader’s activity intense. When we change frames, we have to change our interpretation. How to base our understanding of the story on a specific context when the latter is always denatured?</p>
<p>The two narrators fragment the story, and they produce a repetitive pattern. Each of the narrators gives us details on the same moments of Zanes’ life. The double narration is thus based on the repetition of similar life sequences. The double narration allows repetition to penetrate the narrative. It is thanks to repetition that the reader can make sense of the story’s disconnected elements. The gaps that we apparently cannot coordinate - such as “Is there somebody over there? Zanes said. Probably, his son said” and “All but one of the machines were in use that evening”(72) - are so large that the only way the reader can assemble the fragments of the story is by focusing on the repetitive patterns that connect these partial perspectives. We constantly come across the same moments: the observation of the canoe, meetings between Zanes’ wife and the producer of her cooking show, scenes with Lung, discussions with Seemyon, and so on. The plot offers not so much progress as recurrence, duplication, and reiteration.</p>
<p>In our mind, those terms are usually connected to something monotonous. Yet in “Canoe Repair,” the iteration of words, ideas, and/or themes does not result in a redundant effect on reading. The first reference to “sunset” (56) is echoed by “[o]ne of them materialized at sunset” and “at sunset a window beamed” (57). Through repetition, meaning emerges. Repetition is not used to stop the progression of the plot: the elements of Zanes’ life are never told twice in exactly the same terms. The accumulation of repetitions creates an unusual meaning, a meaning understood through indirect means. Zanes refers to his own time: “my time device” (58), “another time” (61) as opposed to “my wife’s cookbook, my time machine” (69). Zanes’ experience of life does not rely on a chronological structure. When we accept repetition, we understand that time does not need to be seen as a linear progression.</p>
<p>Repetition lets us understand how Zanes organizes his life. The first and last moments of the story present similar scenes. “It was sunset and the boy was angry and wanted to be somewhere else” (56). Zanes and his son are outside watching the canoe for the first time. The first words of the story put the reader in the middle of a situation. The first character we meet is not Zanes but his son referred to as a “boy.” He could be anybody. In that sense, the story can be considered a statement about any family life, its structure, its implicit rules, and its repetitive patterns. The reference to “somewhere else” also puzzles the reader at the beginning of a story; we do not even know where the character <span class="lightEmphasis">is</span>. At the end, we have circled back: “Above me, I felt the presence of my son at his window. If I didn’t take down the screens, it would soon be summer again” (78).</p>
<p>The end is paradoxical since it does not explain the story but at the same time concludes it through indirect means. The story ends on “again,” which alludes to an opening, a repetition of what we have read, maybe an allusion to the beginning if we think of the circularity of the repetitive pattern of the narration. On the other hand, the allusion to the coming summer ends with a period. Spring will soon be finished. We note here again the parallel between the first scene and the last one since the story opens on the ending of something, of a day. We are at a time when Zanes makes a pause in his life. His work on the canoe is what “makes [him] do” (77). His crafting the canoe changes aspects of his life, his relationship with his family and his community. The end of spring makes a kind of conclusion to the story but, at the same time, it opens the story toward a new time period. The conclusion and the opening lead us to different interpretations. We face some conflicting perception of time and closure. Depending on the type of time framework one has in mind, things can be open or closed; that is where the tension originates. The last and first scenes teach us to pay attention to how things are repeated in variation in the story. Both scenes point to a double direction. By examining this process, one understands that repetition is used to let one access Zanes’ subjective knowledge.</p>
<p>In the two scenes, the son and the father are both watching another place, an outsider place. They disagree on the hang-gliding activity. But this tension gets somewhat resolved at the end when they both look again in the same direction. An open conversation about this issue never appears in the story. Tensions are solved indirectly: “Is the leak like worry, no more than worry?” (75). The boat becomes the center of our attention; it is a place where Zanes’ concerns are to be projected and fixed too. The leak of the boat is associated with Zanes’ life: “When you left your job last year you were taking what you had and making it flow into a new system rather than holding onto what had been used. It would have leaked away if you had not made it move into a new system” (63). The canoe becomes a system of reference we share with Zanes to understand his life. The changes he goes through are projected into the repairing of the canoe, and thanks to the details of the crafting we understand the adjustments of his own life.</p>
<p>Connection is hidden where we cannot see it at first sight, where we do not expect it. For instance, a paragraph describing Zanes canoeing ends, “A wind was coming up, and I heard a breathing sound of paddling” (65). The next paragraph begins, “He treaded water and in his mind smelled fish scales. A wind came up. Zanes felt a wash against his dome” (65). The wind coming up appears twice, but the repetition is not identical because it lets us collect different details about Zanes canoeing. The first time, the wind relates to sound, while the second time it is linked to smell and then touch because of the sensation of “wash.” The different senses are connected to the same moment of Zanes’ life, and we gather this general image as well as its fragmented aspect thanks to repetition. Zanes’ sense of the world is not constructed upon a close frontier between things. Wind and breath become one; canoe and lake become one. To Zanes, “the beautiful canoe could loosen in your mind” (73). The different parts of his life (his relationship to Lung, his son, his wife, the canoe, the neighbor) are permeable. They communicate in an unusual way because they get to influence one another without ever being purposely or directly connected. The apparently rambling progression of the content of the story mirrors Zanes’ vision of life. As a result, the nonlinearity guides us.</p>
<p>The relationship between “Canoe Repair” and “Midcourse Corrections” emphasizes the reflections on moments of “repair” or “correction” in one’s life. The two works present pauses at a transitional time. The reading of “Canoe Repair” is the reading of images and themes mapped out in a paradigm linking scattered elements from the story, “Midcourse Corrections,” and the reader’s world. McElroy’s variation on themes common to both “Midcourse Corrections” and “Canoe Repair” is close to Andy Warhol’s technique in a series such as <span class="booktitle">Marilyn</span>. Like the painter, the author chooses a theme and modulates it. This project changes the narrative framework and our reaction to it. We can consider “Midcourse Corrections” and “Canoe Repair” to be doublings on a similar project: both pieces give different perspectives on the same thing, the way “Canoe Repair” also gives partial perspectives on the same plot. When reading “Canoe Repair,” the reader may have “Midcourse Corrections” in mind. Both pieces are meant to add to each other.</p>
<p>In that sense, McElroy “repeat[s] something now to make you remember something then and set[s] you up for something later” (Kawin 34). The reiterations linking the two pieces can be understood as emphases on moments that create echoes in the reader’s network of references. In “Midcourse Corrections,” McElroy writes that his essay is written to “interrupt, interleave, break diverse kinds of documents” (10). “Canoe Repair” can be read as the application of such a project to fiction. The gaps are motivated by a wish to mix disconnected “documents.” Tabbi notes that the interviews “are <span class="lightEmphasis">like</span> a fiction” (160). In that sense, the frontiers between the essay and fiction are blurred because of their connections. Tabbi also claims, “McElroy locates his compositional self in the space between plural subjectivities” (160). The double narration of the story pluralizes Zanes’ subjectivity in a parallel way.</p>
<p>Structurally, the two pieces are surprisingly close. “Midcourse Corrections” is a combination of three interviews interrupted by the author’s reflections, “INSERTS,” and ” <span class="lightEmphasis">workpoints</span>.” The short story and the autobiographical essay display a structure that accepts gaps and emphasizes echoes that connect the two texts. The substance of the canoe’s texture is mirrored by other parts of the essay:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">INSERT: hinge turning: remember those trick hinged pieces of wood that were really constructed with curiously attached canvas strips?</p>
<p class="longQuotation">An essay like that. An interview. A sentence fly-by that manufactures its own canvas in the space it also generates out of a music its thought spun off. (“Corrections” 20)</p>
<p>The crafting activity of canoe repair is paralleled by the composition of writing. The texts’ themes and images branch into one another. As McElroy expresses it, the “mixed metaphor of [his] work extends a fluid trial. Like a mixed metabolism and through the pulmonary winding also unfolding and exfoliation of the sentence’s plot it holds exchanges even between incompatibles” (“Corrections” 15). A paradigm of images is used to progressively construct the original way Zanes conceives his world. We understand how in the story, incompatibles such as “weight” and “lightness” can correlate. In the canoe, “the noble forcing of the ribs into this oval narrow form turned the weight inward into lightness” (67). In one’s life “corrections” and “repair” bring “weight” and “lightness” in contact. Traditional oppositions are reconciled in “Canoe Repair.”</p>
<p>The Laundromat is a place where clothes are washed, but it also becomes a place to meet, a place where life is concentrated. In addition, when Zanes thinks “rowing <span class="lightEmphasis">looks</span> like work” (58), we see how things can serve different purposes. For Zanes, things do not have a unique meaning. Commonly, a Laundromat is used for washing. The rowing activity is meant to move a boat. However, experience changes the use of things. Zanes gives them a power to influence the world indirectly. His time influences the “real time;” his vision of space dialogues with the “real space.”</p>
<p>The reader adapts, concentrating on the unsettling aspects of Zanes’ representation of the world, and it participates in the creation of a simultaneous immobility and movement as when “the canoe [is] moving but … [is] still” (56). The apparent contradiction of this statement is illustrated by the structure of the story, which is partly why we may wonder if the canoe or the landscape is moving. Referring to a similar moment of immobility and movement in <span class="booktitle">Hind’s Kidnap</span>, Tony Tanner explains that “we are all familiar with such optic illusion pictures which can be read in more than one way, often as focus shifts so that figure and ground seem to change places” (219). This optic effect is rendered by the way the story is told. The process of perception alters the representation of time and space: “[t]he lake was part of the canoe” (58).</p>
<p>When reading the description of the canoe, we have an example of a moment when “the eye following the line of something creates motion.” <cite id="note_3">Personal correspondence with the author, June 16, 2001.</cite></p>
<p class="longQuotation">Its grand lines flared to a beam so wide it seemed low and was. Which end was which? Ribs curved with a beautiful singleness up to the gunwales, and, out of the bent tension in which they seemed to grip and bow the ribs, as you ran your eyes over it and felt it the canoe developed a force of tightness and actual lift, as if the noble forcing of the ribs into this oval narrow form turned the weight inward into lightness. (67)</p>
<p>The passage describes the canoe precisely and technically - “ribs,” “gunwales.” We are so close to the ribs of the boat that we get an impression of immensity. The sentences saturated with commas and information prevent us from picturing a full image of the canoe. Each small detail gets enlarged so that each part seems to expand itself infinitely. The movements are underlined: “flared,” “curved,” “bent,” “grip,” “bow,” “lift,” “turned.” The canoe is still but its description creates motion.</p>
<p>This passage can be seen as a micro-structural template for the way the story evolves. The story is the combination of different lines gathered into a unique moment. Indeed, there is a network of words that refer to either abstract images or other words linked to the movement of the boat in the story. The circuitry of words and their relation to other words is as important as what the words refer to. The formal fragmentation and disconnection lets us experience literally what happens in Zanes’ mind. The narrator explains Zanes has a “restless mind” (60) but never explicitly explains what it means. He never gives a full description of the way Zanes orders his thoughts. We access the definition of Zanes’ “restless mind” through the organization of the story. The tensions inviting for “repair” in Zanes’ life are present at any level of the text without ever being clearly expressed. The slow paths of the narration, its fragmentation, and its echoes are images of the canoe which itself reflects the tensions at stake in Zanes’ life.</p>
<p>These descriptions let us experience a different sense of space but also reveal the story’s sensual approach to the world. Zanes’ readjustments orient and transform his vision. Things are examined, and their perception is detailed when Zanes describes his wife swimming, for instance: “He imagined her, and he knew her words had reached some reservoir in his brain, where she was swimming at night, the luminous things like tiny muscular wakes lit up her thighs and the curve of her back” (60). The “luminous things like tiny muscular wakes” are observed with attention, and remind us of a vision of a sculpted body where forms and relief are emphasized. Narration zooms in on details of surfaces, and the intense observation of body parts and of the canoe makes a paradigm of sensual representations. The story pays attention to the concrete surface of things: the canoe looks like a “deer swimming” (56). Things and people are described minutely, and the scale used is so close that the images of the story appear as details of a painting. The details Zanes’ vision focuses on remind us of the indirectness of his actions. Zanes pays attention to things in their details and cannot always see the overall framework of these things. Similarly, he cannot perceive the outcomes of all his actions.</p>
<p>McElroy refers to “’[a]ttention’ [as] a rather cold word [he] use[s] to suggest that the ways in which we embrace the world and embrace other people can be more precise and clear than we think sometimes” (<span class="booktitle">Anything</span> 248). Zanes’ attention to the canoe and to his breath, for instance, as he feels the “air filling the space of [his] chest to be measured by another time” (60), is his way to “embrace the world.” His attention to the world indirectly penetrates his relationships. Zanes’ precise description of the exterior world lets us access his interior world. We understand, when paying attention to the depiction of his environment, why “the lake [is] part of the canoe” (58). People’s lives are permeable, their energies travel into one another. Zanes’ activities involuntarily connect to other areas of his life. The clearer vision of life that appears when Zanes repairs the canoe gets transferred in mysterious ways to the other parts of his life. Different aspects of Zanes’ life influence one another, although it is not clear to him or us how they connect.</p>
<p>The flashes and fragments emphasized in the sequences of the story are used to represent the world: “it is the very abundance of perspectives that conveys abundance of the world under observation” (Iser 226). The canoe is personified by Zanes’ interest in it: “A body was what it was” (73). Zanes’ observations change our perception of the canoe. It is compared to a lover, an animal, and a body: “he almost loved the canoe” (67), “[t]he canoe attracted others to it, they were in its future” (75), and “[a] canoe is what makes you do” (77). Intensity changes the character’s visions of the world.</p>
<p>This intensity also affects the way time is represented in the story. Perception is altered. Likewise, time is distorted. McElroy refers to “the arranging of things in space, the motion of things and persons in space. Time dissolved into spatial relations.” <cite id="note_4">Personal correspondence with the author, June 16, 2001.</cite> When Zanes asks, “what if space was time?” (72), his question could be considered as a comment on the devices used by the author. In “Canoe Repair,” time is peculiar since it is fragmented and does not follow a plain progression. McElroy writes in “Midcourse Corrections” that his writing is to be understood as “modifications of language editing the rhetoric of what’s inside and not disclaiming faith that the words really rendered things and motions outside - and outside, somehow, consciousness” (13). The subjective experience of Zanes’ time is spatialized in the story. “Outside” and “consciousness,” connected in “Midcourse Corrections,” become the pivot of “Canoe Repair.”</p>
<p>The story covers approximately seven months (“One bright mid-September afternoon” [65] to “summer soon” [77]), but the vision we have is the vision of an infinite time without bearings or perhaps a very short time so dense that the notion of its temporality is not valid. The sentences are constructed in order to convey the circuits and canals of Zanes’ stream of consciousness and even his perception process sometimes. Time is altered by perception and becomes spatialized in the story. We think about the witty reference to the <span class="lightEmphasis">Times</span> and the “two <span class="lightEmphasis">Timeses</span> for the price of one” (“Corrections” 19) that could ironically summarize the treatment of time in the short story where subjective time is juxtaposed to seasonal time. When reading “Canoe Repair,” we face two experiences of time: one that is subjective and distorted by experience, and the other that is universal and related to the seasons referred to in the story. The original structure of the story, its fragmentation, and connections to “Midcourse Corrections,” is a means for the author to present a subjective system of perception.</p>
<p>When allowing the defamiliarizing elements of the story to change our reading, we penetrate a new experience of the world, of perception, and of time. For example, the image of the canoe passing is a recurrent pattern in the short story: “It came out of a cove as quiet as a deer swimming” (56), “[t]he canoe’s animal flanks and low length absorbed the two paddlers” (57), “[t]he lake was part of the canoe” (58), “[t]reading water, my hand upon the overturned canoe” (65), and so on. These allusions create a network of references to the symbolical meaning of the slow movement characteristic of an infinite moment. The personal experience of Zanes’ time transforms the time of the story: “But he wondered what the long bark canoe felt like. Its length and strong delicacy. Its secret speed. Its time” (64). The canoe has its particular pace, its own time. Reading “Canoe Repair” is experiencing canoe(ing) time.</p>
<h2>Works Cited</h2>
<p>Culler, Jonathan. <span class="booktitle">On Deconstruction. Theory and Criticism after Structuralism</span>. London: Routledge, 1983.</p>
<p>Kawin, Bruce. <span class="booktitle">Telling it Again and Again. Repetition in Literature and Film</span>. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1972</p>
<p>Iser, Wolfgang. <span class="booktitle">The Implied Reader. Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett</span>. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins UP, 1974.</p>
<p>McHale, Brian. <span class="booktitle">Postmodernist Fiction</span>. London: Routledge, 1996.</p>
<p>McElroy, Joseph. “Canoe Repair.” <span class="journaltitle">The Review of Contemporary Fiction</span> 10. 1. (Spring 1990): 56-79.</p>
<p>_____ “Midcourse Corrections.” <span class="journaltitle">The Review of Contemporary Fiction</span> 10. 1. (Spring 1990): 9-56.</p>
<p>_____ “Neural Neighborhoods and Other Concrete Abstracts.” <span class="journaltitle">Tri Quarterly</span> 34 (Fall 1975): 201-17.</p>
<p>LeClair, Tom and Larry McCaffery. <span class="booktitle">Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists</span>. Urbana: University of Illinois P,1983.</p>
<p>Porush, David. <span class="booktitle">The Soft Machine: Cybernetic Fiction</span>. New York: Methuen, 1985.</p>
<p>Saltzman, Arthur. <span class="booktitle">The Novel in the Balance</span>. Columbia: U of South Carolina, 1993.</p>
<p>Tabbi, Joseph. <span class="booktitle">Postmodern Sublime. Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk</span>. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1995.</p>
<p>Tanner, Tonny. <span class="booktitle">Scenes of Nature, Signs of Men</span>. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 1987.</p>
<h2>Notes</h2>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/flore-chevaillier">Flore Chevaillier</a>, <a href="/tags/chevaillier">Chevaillier</a>, <a href="/tags/joseph-mcelroy">Joseph McElroy</a>, <a href="/tags/mcelroy">mcelroy</a>, <a href="/tags/culler">Culler</a>, <a href="/tags/kawin">Kawin</a>, <a href="/tags/iser">iser</a>, <a href="/tags/mchale">mchale</a>, <a href="/tags/leclair">leclair</a>, <a href="/tags/larry-mccaffery">larry mccaffery</a>, <a href="/tags/porush">porush</a>, <a href="/tags/saltzman">Saltzman</a>, <a href="/tags/repetition">repetition</a>, <a href="/tags/recurrence">recurrence</a>, <a href="/tags/variation">variation</a>, <a href="/tags/boating">boating</a>, <a href="/tags/canoe">canoe</a>, <a href="/tags/repair">repair</a>, <a href="/tags/fiction">fiction</a>, <a href="/tags/american">american</a>, <a href="/tags/contemporary">contemporary</a>, <a href="/tags/tabbi">tabbi</a>, <a href="/tags/postmodern">postmodern</a>, <a href="/tags/tanner">tanner</a>, <a href="/tags"></a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1095 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comJoseph McElroy's Cyborg Plushttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/seeing
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Salvatore Proietti</div>
</div>
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<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2004-08-18</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><h2>1. All around <span class="booktitle">Plus</span></h2>
<p>What do we gain in looking at Joseph McElroy’s <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> as, among other things, a science-fiction novel? <cite id="note_1">Along with the experience of translating <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> and the essay ” <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> Light” into Italian, I recently had two chances in Rome to talk about McElroy, a doctoral seminar on Beckett and a conference on Emerson. I acknowledge my gratitude to the organizers, Professors Agostino Lombardo, Giorgio Mariani, and Igina Tattoni, as well as to Daniela Daniele who first alerted me about this project.</cite> In science fiction, a literalized metaphor is extended and made to become the narrative center of a possible, estranged world, as theorists have argued (cf. Suvin). My reading of <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> focuses on the presence of the icon of the compound entity, organic and technological at the same time, which science and science fiction have called the “cyborg.” Throughout its history, this metaphor has been put to manifold uses: agent of unrestrained power and authority, form of absolute subjection and dispossession, attempt at hopeful interaction between humans and technology.</p>
<p>Despite long and sustained attention from critics, science fiction appears not to have made it into respectability, and cautious caveats continue to accompany many readers’ responses when facing texts and authors deemed worthy of critical praise. In the specific case of <span class="booktitle">Plus</span>, critics have both argued and denied its generic status (respectively, cf. LeClair’s introduction to the 1987 edition [v], and Hadas), and only in the 1990s did references to the cyborg begin to appear (Tabbi 145). In general, analyzing such a struggle for legitimacy would lead a long way into both aesthetic and institutional issues, in which old-fashioned standards of timelessness are still applied by commentators who regard with suspicion the use of metaphors whose “technological” or “scientific” signifiers (whether coming from “hard” or “soft” sciences) are hopelessly bound to historical contingency, haunted by the specter of a readership not necessarily coinciding with the “distinction” of canonicity. With regard to McElroy, the “disproportion between accomplishment and recognition” pointed out by Tom LeClair (ibid.) might precisely stem from an emphasis on science unparalleled among contemporary Anglophone novelists.</p>
<p>For our purposes, it might suffice to say that <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> is, among other things, the best science-fiction novel written in the 1970s by a non-specialized writer. Formally speaking, its focus on the standpoint of the cyborg, providing an inside view of the consciousness of the (semi-)artificial intelligence, brings <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> closer to a genre novel such as Pat Cadigan’s 1993 <span class="booktitle">Fools</span> (another novel about a search for memories) rather than to a highbrow take such as Richard Powers’ <span class="booktitle">Galatea 2.2</span>: if the latter is a novel about the confrontation with the posthuman, McElroy and Cadigan’s protagonists try to enact what <span class="lightEmphasis">being</span> posthuman might be like.</p>
<p>Among McElroy’s works, the presence of science-fictional motifs also haunts <span class="booktitle">Women and Men</span>. And in going through the essays reprinted in his recent Italian collection, <span class="booktitle">Exponential</span>, one finds many references to science-fiction writers and works: from precursors such as Samuel Butler (16) and Jules Verne (38); to contemporary genre classics such as Arthur C. Clarke’s <span class="booktitle">2001: A Space Odyssey</span> (32-4, 37), J. G. Ballard (47, 55, 64, 76), and Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s <span class="booktitle">The Sirens of Titan</span>, in conjunction with mentions of William Burroughs and cyberpunk (75); to non-specialized examples such as Richard Powers (78), John Barth’s <span class="booktitle">Giles Goat-Boy</span> (34, 54, 76), William Hjortsberg’s cyborg novel <span class="booktitle">Gray Matters</span> (58), and Italo Calvino’s <span class="booktitle">Cosmicomics</span> cycle, along with a story from that cycle’s immediate model in Italian literature, Primo Levi’s collection <span class="booktitle">The Periodic Table</span> (69-70). <span class="booktitle">Exponential</span> also contains reviews of Calvino’s <span class="booktitle">Invisible Cities</span> (115-9) and Samuel Beckett’s <span class="booktitle">The Lost Ones</span> (125-9), both at least marginally science-fictional texts. To these I would add the mentions of Doris Lessing’s <span class="booktitle">The Four-Gated City</span> and, again, of Calvino in LeClair and McCaffery’s interview (238, 244) - different facets in a consistent tradition of literature exploring the territories of science.</p>
<p>The metaphor of the cyborg has a very long history in 20th century science and science fiction, which here can only be hinted at. <cite id="note_2">I tried to examine this history in my unpublished PhD dissertation. For some probings into cyberpunk discourse, cf. my “Jeremiad” and “Bodies.”</cite> Heads or minds separated from bodies: an age-old dream, or nightmare, with intertextual resonances emerging so strongly that isolating dominant texts and filiations is virtually impossible. Much is at stake in this metaphor and in all discourses evoking it, with fiction and nonfiction creating two parallel histories with mutually communicating rhetorics. Since the beginning in the 1920s, in the speculations of scientists such as J. D. Bernal and J. B. S. Haldane, personal body, body politic, and space have been interacting. In Bernal’s <span class="booktitle">The World, the Flesh, and the Devil</span> (1929), the “colonization of space and the mechanization of the body are obviously complementary” (73): cosmic policing and prosthetic technology will free the human mind from all material fetters and ensure its undying control over the universe. Individual self-sufficiency and will to expansiveness are the collective ideals incarnated in a view of the body such as that of Alexis Carrel, Nobel-prize winning pioneer of transplant technology, who sees in his popular <span class="booktitle">Man, the Unknown</span> (1935) skin and body surfaces as “the almost perfect fortified frontier of a closed world” (65).</p>
<p>And since the 1930s, U.S. pulp authors powerfully include semi-artificial humans and brains encased in boxes in the repertoire of their imagery, often drawing on Darwinian and eugenic myths: tales on transparent eyeballs being nothing and seeing all, dominating space and other people, parables on technoscientific hubris, in different degrees of tension between empowerment and socialization.</p>
<p>Officially, the birth of the cyborg takes place in 1960 at a conference held at Brooks Air Force Base, Texas, in a paper delivered by physicians Nathan S. Kline and Manfred Clynes, entitled “Drugs, Space, and Cybernetics: Evolution to Cyborgs.” In their view, the cyborg prefigures the advent and triumph of “participant evolution”: (military) science and technology are about to make possible the planning and designing of infinite variants of <span class="lightEmphasis">homo sapiens</span>, able to live long and prosper in the worlds of space exploration. This new entity “deliberately incorporates exogenous components extending the self-regulatory control function of the organism in order to adapt it to new environments.” Body processes and the attendant “robot-like problems are taken care of automatically and unconsciously, thus freeing man to explore, to create, to think, and to feel” (347-8). Their epic narrative of mastery over the universe, while ostensibly foregrounding a pluralism of embodiments, posits not only a mechanistic view of the body, but also a faith and hope in its irrelevance and coming supersession: the self-regulating, homeostatic balance along the boundary of the interface between organic and inorganic components renders the cyborg less an empowered body than an armored mind. The body mechanic is the body obsolete, a pure thinking apparatus, who has broken free of the devilish materiality of world and flesh: a literal self-made man, capable of “adapting his body to whatever milieu he chooses (345).</p>
<p>With its Protean self-making act and its asocial expansive thrust, the cyborg is ready to connect into the mainstream of U.S. national mythology. Following in the steps of early cyberneticians such as Norbert Wiener and Vannevar Bush, Kline and Clynes also present their creation as conqueror of a “New Frontier” (347). In this vein, before cyberpunk made science fiction part of the postmodernist narrative, two decades crowded with theory, fiction, and popularization had established a rhetoric centered on the drive toward the limitless frontiers of scientific imagination. This rhetoric, turning ostensible symbiosis and coupling into (self)instrumentalization, was - and to a great extent still is - divided between celebrations of omnipotence soon to come and specular humanistic recoils from reification, but united in saluting the cyborg, either with enthusiasm or with dismay, as a new beginning for the American self (cderf. Martin), launched toward definitive abandonment of the body and of history: Leo Marx’s technological sublime as a dream come true for the individual and as an analogue for the nation (cf. Wilson).</p>
<p>As studies such as Mark Dery’s <span class="booktitle">Escape Velocity</span> and N. Katherine Hayles’ <span class="booktitle">How We Became Posthuman</span> show, at the core of much theorizing about the posthuman still lie those same dreams - informed with a technological determinism which figures such as Marshall McLuhan and Alvin Toffler have updated and popularized for the contemporary age. From the science-fiction field the responses to this finalistic narrative have been more nuanced, exploring the cyborg identity in detail, with a keener awareness that both personal bodies and the body politic are made of very resistant materials, all of which (including ethics and language) must be considered on their own terms. The very root of the genre, inherent to the idea that science and technology can become usable tools for literature, is a deep faith in metaphor, in the hope that possible worlds can be created in the reader’s mind capable of providing estranged versions of its own world. As Darko Suvin writes, these fictions are complex parables, not mechanic allegories (“homologies,” as McElroy describes his attempt in <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> in many of his essays: cf. ” <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> Light” and <span class="booktitle">Exponential</span> 81): linguistic creations, but nevertheless narratively solid and reconstructible, always meant to achieve an inner consistency. In this, science fiction has always proposed a challenge that appears to escape the dichotomy between ontology and epistemology, between world and interpretation: the science-fictional worlds have at their center an “absent paradigm” (Angenot) just as Faulkner’s have at their center a “climactic ellipsis” (Materassi) <cite id="note_3">Both these notions (ironically resonating, I realize as I write, with the matter at hand), in different ways, might also be pertinent to the themes of McElroy’s The Letter Left to Me, a novel of endurance in the face of loss whose Beckettian undertones are no less strong than those of <span class="booktitle">Plus</span>.</cite> : the interpretive quest of the reader, ultimately, consists in recostructing the world the narration itself is an emanation of. Therefore, I would maintain that the relevance of <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> lies in its taking its central metaphor seriously and in its own terms. <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> goes much further and deeper than texts that “simply” (quotation marks are due, of course, in order not to unduly belittle achievements such as Powers’ <span class="booktitle">Galatea 2.2</span> or Barth’s <span class="booktitle">Giles Goat-Boy</span>) explore it for its impact on an observer who is participant but ultimately safely on the outside of the boundary between science and the body. Thus, I would argue that one tenor of McElroy’s multiplex parable is the assertion that such a somewhat nostalgic intellectual figure still belonging to a separate sphere is no longer conceivable. McElroy’s cyborg’s tale “told from within” is an example of pure science fiction, of what science fiction should be, of what all important science fiction manages to be.</p>
<h2>2. In Touch with Imp Plus</h2>
<p>In the critical mainstream surrounding <span class="booktitle">Plus</span>, many have read the novel as an example of a “world elsewhere” created by an empowered self (cf. Brooke-Rose; LeClair, Art 144-6; Miller), a Cartesian subject dominating a literally mechanized <span class="lightEmphasis">res extensa</span>. In such analyses, cybernetics provides a template for self-sustaining aesthetic autonomy (cf. Porush, <span class="booktitle">Fiction</span>). Rather, I would read <span class="booktitle">Plus</span>, the interior monologue of the brain of a dying scientist implanted into an orbiting satellite, as an early metafictional, intertextual critique of the rhetoric of absolute, empowering openness, and of transcendence through disembodiment.</p>
<p>My analysis will follow, in the progress of Imp Plus’ linguistic and cognitive self-awareness, the tension between openness and closure, between expansion (or retreat?) into an undifferentiated void and the (re)discovery and inescapable necessity of coming to terms with its own new bodily being, with the world and with otherness. I will read its final act as the double rejection of both the myth of the instrumental body and of the myth of unfettered expansiveness - that is, of the most widespread ideological assumptions underlying the rhetoric of human-technological interfaces (either in the years preceding the publication of <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> or in much current “cyberculture”).</p>
<p>As the novel starts, the explanted brain is indeed a literalization of Emerson’s classic transparent eyeball scenario: a <span class="lightEmphasis">tabula rasa</span> hooked into an “Interplanetary Monitoring Platform” experimenting on solar energy storing devices, perceiving himself against the background of a surrounding void. But in the very act of self-perception - an act of feeling, an act of imagining - Emerson’s <span class="booktitle">Nature</span> is powerfully revised:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">He found it all around. It opened and was close. He felt it was itself, but felt it was more.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">It nipped open from outside in and from inside out. Imp Plus found it all around, and this was not the start. (3)</p>
<p>For Imp Plus, this feeling of openness and openendedness brings about the awareness of a previous existence. The emergence of his own self is never privileged as a creation <span class="lightEmphasis">ex nihilo</span>, and involves a two-way traffic, a true interaction between subject and world. Imp Plus’ acquisition of language also starts from scraps of past and present experiences and not from scratch. Consistent with this, language and vision (being and understanding, ontology and epistemology, self-scrutiny and outward observation) are facets of the same drive: ” <span class="lightEmphasis">see</span> was the need or effect of <span class="lightEmphasis">say</span> ” (143). As in Emerson’s <span class="booktitle">Divinity School Address</span>, here too “always the seer is the sayer. Somehow his dream is told…clearest and most permanent in words” (78). Imp Plus’ first metalinguistic remark is about sight: “Socket was a word” (3). In learning how to see himself, he learns how to say himself. This is the experience he describes, over and over, as “lifting,” as he acquires (at once acquiring again and acquiring anew) the language with which to express his condition, and to communicate it to others. What he perceives and communicates, though - and this is definitely unlike Emerson - is the birth of a body. The attempt of overcoming dispossession and instrumentalization can only be predicated on physical existence; his first attempts at articulate communications will be about the development of his new perceptual system, centering on the imagery of growth - a growth involving a process of cellular fusion and differentiation of unheard-of proportions, and allowing a new consciousness, capable of acting beyond originally programmed routine operations, to emerge together with the new body.</p>
<p>From the very first page of <span class="booktitle">Plus</span>, memories start coming in, sketches from a fragmented mind trickling in recurring associations, scenes, as well as isolated words and phrases. And what makes this protagonist unforgettably moving is his unceasing quest for love among the ruins of a past which does not even yield his “human” name: moments back on Earth, ill and dying, with wife and daughter; moments with a “woman at the California sea,” and with another one met shortly before the final operation of brain excision, “by the Mexican fire” (109), which also triggers images of birds and the sun. In the past and in the present, in emotions and body, the sun resonates as a salvific force, just like the repeated reminiscence about the encounter with the blind, bandaged “news vendor,” who manages to compensate for his sightlessness and keeps trying to perceive the world. Most disturbing are the conversations with the “Acrid Voice,” who tells him that the eventual orbital decay of the satellite might somehow be controlled (perhaps with the brain’s own help), so that he might be recovered, but who left too many doubts to be fully believable.</p>
<p>In the following chapters the disordered accumulation of memories slowly and progressively coalesces into semantic clusters of highly specialized languages associated with biology, alternating and coexisting with an initially minimal vocabulary, articulated through an incremental process of linguistic redundancy and overload (cf. LeClair “McElroy”), of repetition with variants:</p>
<p>Imp Plus caved out. There was a lifting all around, and Imp Plus knew there was no skull. But there had been another lifting and he had wanted it, but then that lifting had not been good. He did not want to go back to it. He did not know if that lifting had been bad. But this new lifting was good. (3)</p>
<p>If Imp Plus is a cyborg, it is one very much like that of Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto,” among many other reasons because in <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> there is no nostalgia for any idealized past experience: Imp Plus’ past as an integral human is one source of his present state as an integrated cyborg, not the goal or hope of a fullness he strives for. As the new identity develops, the organic and the inorganic are bound to interact, without according either component any superior or inferior status. And this past has no intrinsic ethical connotations, is the site of both positive and negative present sensations.</p>
<p>In the above quoted third paragraph, ethics is introduced in the shape of ambiguity: there are, within Imp Plus’ words, a number of types and meanings of “lifting,” and the option between good and bad shows up as inescapable, if not always with a clear-cut value judgment following it: the lifting of the brain from the body (from “the skull”), the launch into space, the activation of the new system of (self-)perception. And somewhere in the background, an echo from that solitary “head” in Emerson’s <span class="booktitle">Nature</span>, “uplifted into infinite space”, intent on being “nothing” and “see[ing] all,” throwing at the self and at others a literal and imaginative imperative: “Build…your own world” (Emerson 6, 46). Here, though, there is no lifted mind prior to the world-building striving: the entire novel, indeed, portrays the mutual construction of a subject and its surroundings. Linking both is the former’s will to existence, a choice and a longing which for the semiartificial being is no less (perhaps, more), as it were, heartfelt than it would be for an ordinary human.</p>
<p>The only automatism in Imp Plus’ action is his choosing to perceive its own self, rejecting the position of mere “monitor,” receptor or reflector, passively intent on perceiving the outside. In doing so, he refuses the master narrative of the cyborg as instrumental body (upheld by cyberneticians and other rhapsodes of the posthuman), which means for him being <span class="lightEmphasis">somebody else’s</span> instrument, and instead embraces another longing, which sees the technologizing of the body as the possible catalyst for a new fulfilling relation between subject and object. There is a contest for autonomy going on inside the cyborg body, but it is a contest in which there is no direct relation between component and axiology: organic vs. inorganic are not equated to whole vs. reified (as in classic liberal attitudes) or to obsolete vs. futuristic (as in teleologic-posthumanist speculations). Both elements can be the site of such a contest, and their inevitable interaction can bring about further complication; as Haraway writes, “the relation between organism and machine has been a border war [involving] <span class="lightEmphasis">pleasure</span> in the construction of boundaries and… <span class="lightEmphasis">responsibility</span> in their construction” (150).</p>
<p>Many are the boundaries crossed by McElroy’s cyborg self. Fragmented as he is, Imp Plus (the “more,” the “Plus” supplementing the “he” with the “it” - after all, “Imp Plus” = “I am “Plus,” as noted by LeClair [“McElroy” 35]) will become a multiply inclusive being, holding together two <span class="lightEmphasis">kinds</span> of components, not just two items: organic elements include the brain and the nutrients he is inserted in (vegetables and glucose are mentioned), connected with several computer and measuring systems. In this way, the “cognitive estrangement” (Suvin) of this science-fictional situation presents the reader with a surprising, hopeful possibility of heterogeneous wholeness; as McElroy said in his interview with LeClair and McCaffery, “I also saw in <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> the good old theme of reintegrating the body and the soul, a dynamic drama of growth, unexpected growth” (239). And, as he commented in ” <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> Light,” about the reformulation of personal autonomy in the age of technology: “In <span class="booktitle">Plus</span>, in Imp Plus, you have something in between instrument and person. In the beginning you do.”</p>
<p>In this complicated drama of desire and frustration, all the verbal games redefine but never erase the presence of a consciousness. Whereas the reader might be baffled by the juxtaposition of indirect and free indirect discourse, in the novel most glaring for his listeners on Earth is the confusion within Imp Plus’ communication between the speech of his operative functions and the speech of self-reflection, which leads him to evoke the “shadows” of his memories in one of his dialogues with Ground Control: “The answer was that Imp Plus was able to think in transmission” (11). Bakhtinian and not Chomskyan, he has the ability to think dialogically; his self-perception is connected to communication with others. And he learns how to lie.</p>
<p>If Imp Plus opens his self-expression by talking about an opening, as he begins to gain some degree of self-awareness, the awareness of a distinction between self and world, between the <span class="lightEmphasis">he</span> and the <span class="lightEmphasis">it</span> of his first sentence, brings about a degree of closure. As in frontier discourse the advance of the settlement can only be the cause of a receding of the open territory, in <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> pleasure can only be shaped by the needs and responsibilities of selfhood:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Everywhere he went there was a part just missing. A particle of difference. And in its place an inclination, a sharp drop.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">And through this Imp Plus thought: or was suddenly looking back at having thought: that those particles that were just missing were driven away by the aim of his looking: and that his sight was the Sun’s force turned back into light in him by means of an advanced beam. He had many aims. He?… The Sun in Imp Plus was one eye; and if so what might be two? It was the chance of something.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">What came to Imp Plus amid the brightness was that some of him was left.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">So some of the gradients were Imp Plus.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Which was why he could fall into himself. (6)</p>
<p>Imp Plus’ outward drive, almost immediately, encounters the limitations of identity, even as he strives toward other purposes (“aims”) than those imposed upon him by the controlling agencies from Earth, and finds among the signals another sight worth detecting (that is, himself). As the potential becomes actual, as that “chance” becomes the possibility of “something” specific, his vocabulary translates all this into images of a downhill course: a Fall for the cyborg.</p>
<p>At the end of Chapter 2, already “the more that was all around was getting closer and closer to Imp Plus” (22): as he builds himself, he also builds a boundary <span class="lightEmphasis">around</span> his self, meeting constriction while at the same time looking for freedom. In this condition, the cybernetic feedback of a character bootstrapping himself into selfhood can only appear as suffering, as the loss of a Beckettian sort of pre-Oedipal bliss: “He had nothing to stand on; the bulge he was on was himself. The bulge was on the brink of the cleft, the cleft was in a fold, the fold was more open, and when it was all open it would not be a fold. He could not help wanting this, but with each unfolding a fold was gone” (98).</p>
<p>As flashes and associations keep bringing back his past existence, body and human connections become a pervasive “absence” (136), “emptiness” (195), “vacancy” (196), which must be compared with the present situation: “Words remembering other words, but new words for what he had become” (142). At the threshold between past embodiment and present disembodiment, Imp Plus imagines himself as a personified “fence” (151, 159), imposing limits upon what could only have been a source of perfect fulfillment as an unfulfilled promise of boundless openness to be contemplated from the edge. As Imp Plus’ memory progresses - as his contacts with Ground Control continue - past connections appear more and more vivid and more and more distant, in “an emptiness of reciprocal failure to be remembered between them in which they began to share if not know what was escaping each other’s thought” (212).</p>
<p>Words are also presences surrounding him and linking him with Earth: Ground Control, Travel Light (Travelling on Light, Operation TL), Cap Com, the Good Voice and the Acrid Voice, and the Dim Echo, which is both outside Imp Plus’ new being and a part of him, wholly subordinate to the Ground agencies - ironically, the closest thing to an “original” self he can claim (and whom he can access far less easily than Ground). For Imp Plus and for the reader of his story, the ghostly presence he calls the Dim Echo is an ominous, cold reminder that the semi-artificial being might be more human (more humane) than the remnants of his flesh-and-blood human counterpart. Keeping them all together, keeping together what he describes as a “great lattice,” within and around himself, the light: a connection which is immaterial, but emotionally and physically real.</p>
<p>Sensations and emotions are the part of the past he is still reaching out for:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Imp Plus wanted to find the foot he had put in the yellow leather shoe; to find the voice in which he had told the blind news vendor in that cold place in another sea, “That’s my daughter,” as she ran down the pavement to meet the dark-haired woman. He wanted to find…the eyes to see spilt blood, spilt smells, the point of jokes, things not so beautiful as what had come to him through growth… (204)</p>
<p>But one of his ties with the past is hardly conducive to hope: “the Acrid inferences would not let up” (ibid.), confirming that his fate lies in his present state; he can’t go home again: “He had to see his being only as it was now” (143).</p>
<p>And the way he is now is determined by those unknown forces who try to keep him under control, for unstated (given the origin of cyborg speculations, we have to ask, military?) purposes. Knowing, growing, search for origins, self-determination, all are mediated and shaped in the proud construction of language right at the moment in which deconstruction (or <span class="lightEmphasis">un</span> construction) appears triumphant. Self-diminishment, like Bartleby’s anorexia, could be a way of imposing one’s own vanishing self as a felt absence. And yet <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> is all about the recreation of a <span class="lightEmphasis">presence</span>: not (as in Ihab Hassan’s <span class="booktitle">The Dismemberment of Orpheus</span>) a literature of silence, but a literature <span class="lightEmphasis">out</span> of silence and speechlessness (in a confrontation with “Voices”): a will to remaking when the unmaking process is spreading everywhere.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">Plus</span>, in other words, reinterprets its acknowledged sources, Samuel Beckett’s <span class="booktitle">The Lost Ones</span> and the history of Moon flights (especially Apollo 13) as parables of impossibility of control over personal and collective existence, and of endurance and defense of dignity in such a condition of isolation. Space might be a trap, but offers also a dream never to be discarded. And thinking of McElroy’s references to Calvino, we could probably add the <span class="booktitle">Cosmicomics’</span> protagonist, Qwfwq, as a source for McElroy’s fascination with weightlessness (a keyword in Calvino, of course) already pointed out by Tony Tanner (Scenes 207-37).</p>
<p>As in the previously quoted passage from Emerson, in both seeing and saying, Imp Plus as well is looking for some kind of permanence. So, the most Beckettian passages in <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> are its strongest affirmations of hope: “Imp Plus knew he had no eyes. Yet Imp Plus saw. Or persisted in seeing” (3). And later:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">He had no choice but to go on to understand what was going on. No choice he thought but to be centered and to see out from the brain hub, but then in from the body bonds; see meanwhile from the rounds of tendril bendings up out of cells near an open cleft to those message rounds pressed small in the bulb-bun of branchings at the rear of the brain, to (then) the fine turn of a limb tip finding a nearby limb to join or a bulkhead shine to brush. He thought in the pieces - he did not know how except that the pieces whether refracting in toward a center he hardly had any more or aiming each its own moves separate along a many-sided tissue of inclination were him. So Imp Plus tried to take heed, tried to think - what was it? (118)</p>
<p>Centerless and multiplex, shapeless and manifold (in this, similar to many protagonists of contemporary U.S. fiction, as Tony Tanner argued in <span class="booktitle">City of Words</span>), his new identity thrills and scares Imp Plus at the same time:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Him.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">He found it on his mouth and in his breath. <span class="lightEmphasis">Him</span>. A thing in all of him. But now he wasn’t sure. He saw he’d felt this <span class="lightEmphasis">him</span> in the brain. But where was it now? In too many centers.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">And there was a shifting like the subtraction of a land mass so two or more seas that had been apart now slid together. What happened to this <span class="lightEmphasis">him</span>? (114)</p>
<p>The scary part is that any process bears the mark of inherent instability: any growth can become a decline: “He was not just increasing. He could become less” (132). After all, he will never be isolated by the rest of “humanity,” just as he has never been; the threat of the “Concentration Loop” will always accompany him: “Which meant Imp <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> would be in touch with Ground again” (155).</p>
<p>In the end he is forced to consider the alternatives, which he tries to sort out with his new powers (as McElroy writes in ” <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> Light,” Imp is “evidently neuro-connected to Ground Control, word-wired, linked electronically, pulse-translatable evidently into communicable sounds - thought-wired?”: a form of telepathy?):</p>
<p class="longQuotation">So he began to answer and to ask. And while the IMP twisted, tumbled, spun, and pushed into lesser orbits, Imp Plus talked to the familiar ovals of the Acrid Voice. And not knowing where to begin, he used old words the Acrid Voice used. Words sometimes that the Acrid Voice had been going to use. But more wonderful than this in all the words that passed was what they lacked. It was far more than the words were equal to.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Imp Plus felt it all around. If he did not wish to tell Ground that what had been at first a body grown like a starfish of mouthless hydra seemed now other than body, wish faded into inability which was in turn only a shadow thrown by his sense that he could preserve what the Sun hoped they might become. (184)</p>
<p>He can cooperate in order to be retrieved, he can run away toward deep space: but then, both these options would mean accepting the patterns of instrumentalization and asocial empowerment the Powers-That-Be hope to incarnate in the cyborg body, whereas Imp Plus wants and needs connection and, above all, communication: “He had to tell all the truth he knew” (201).</p>
<p>The final question from Ground, as he is about to enter the Earth atmosphere toward likely self-destruction, has obvious allegorical undertones: “DO YOU HAVE POWER? ” (214). His self may have been developing, but rather than “transcendence through power” and the “mastery…of the re-creative intellect” (Miller 175, 177), McElroy and his cyborg seem preoccupied with the uncertainty of an alienated interiority, and Imp Plus’ answer is “YES AND NO… <span class="lightEmphasis">No desire to carom into space, no desire for re-entry</span> ” (214-5).</p>
<p>In concomitantly refusing to act as pure instrument, and to accept the mythologies of individual expansiveness, McElroy’s cyborg satellite restores a role to embodiment. As Tabbi writes, the “body he desires, like any sublime object, is made all the more painfully real to Imp Plus by virtue of its unattainability” (143). The finale of Imp Plus’ story appears to be a heroic sacrifice in the quest for a fulfilling form of literally limited, yet non-alienated self.</p>
<p>Something very solid melts into air in this ending: this is a defeat. And yet, this defeated, powerless science-fictional being ironically incarnates a hope. In Daniele’s interview, McElroy talks about the need for moving away and beyond wholesale rejections of technology, so common among intellectuals, and provocatively evokes Thoreau in connection with <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> (100). And ” <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> Light” concludes by describing the novel as a science-fictional pastoral idyll. And indeed, skeptical as it is, <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> appears to have been literally an ironic novel about the construction of a garden in the middle of the machine. A postmodern novel about innocence.</p>
<h2>Works Cited</h2>
<p>Angenot, Marc. “The Absent Paradigm.” <span class="journaltitle">Science-Fiction Studies</span> 6 (1979): 9-19.</p>
<p>Bernal, J. D. <span class="booktitle">The World, the Flesh, and the Devil</span>. London: Kegan, 1929.</p>
<p>Brooke-Rose, Christine. <span class="booktitle">A Rhetoric of the Unreal</span>. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981.</p>
<p>Cadigan, Pat. <span class="booktitle">Fools</span>. New York: Bantam, 1993.</p>
<p>Carrel, Alexis. <span class="booktitle">Man, the Unknown</span>. New York: Harper, 1935.</p>
<p>Daniele, Daniela. “Joseph McElroy: Cervelli in orbita.” <span class="booktitle">Scrittori e finzioni d’America</span>. Ed. Daniela Daniele. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2000. 97-102.</p>
<p>Dery, Mark. <span class="booktitle">Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century</span>. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1996.</p>
<p>Emerson, Ralph Waldo. <span class="booktitle">Selected Prose and Poetry</span>. Ed. Reginald L. Cook. New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1950.</p>
<p>Hadas, Pamela W. “Green Thoughts on Being in Charge: Discovering Joseph McElroy’s <span class="booktitle">Plus</span>.” <span class="journaltitle">Review of Contemporary Fiction</span> 10 (1990): 140-55.</p>
<p>Hassan, Ihab. <span class="booktitle">The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Towards a Postmodern Literature</span>. New York: Oxford UP, 1982.</p>
<p>Haraway, Donna J. <span class="booktitle">Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature</span>. New York: Routledge, 1991.</p>
<p>Hayles, N. Katherine. <span class="booktitle">How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics</span>. Chicago: U. of Chicago P, 1999.</p>
<p>Kline, Nathan S., and Manfred Clynes. “Drugs, Space, and Cybernetics: Evolution to Cyborgs.” <span class="booktitle">Psychophysiological Aspects of Space Flight</span>. Ed. Bernard E. Flaherty. New York: Columbia UP, 1961. 345-71.</p>
<p>LeClair, Tom. <span class="booktitle">The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction</span>. Urbana: U. of Illinois P, 1989.</p>
<p>–. Introduction. Joseph McElroy. <span class="booktitle">Plus</span>. New York: Carroll and Graf, 1987. v-x.</p>
<p>–. “Joseph McElroy and the Art of Excess.” <span class="journaltitle">Contemporary Literature</span> 21 (1980): 15-37.</p>
<p>– and Larry McCaffery. “Interview with Joseph McElroy.” <span class="booktitle">Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists</span>. Ed. Tom LeClair and Larry McCaffery. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1983. 235-51.</p>
<p>Materassi, Mario. “The Model of Climactic Ellipsis, or, The Event as Mask.” <span class="booktitle">The Artist and His Masks: William Faulkner’s Metafiction</span>. Ed. Agostino Lombardo. Rome: Bulzoni, 1991. 193-9.</p>
<p>Martin, Terence. <span class="booktitle">Parables of Possibility: The American Need for Beginnings</span>. New York: Columbia UP, 1995.</p>
<p>McElroy, Joseph. <span class="booktitle">Exponential</span>. Trans. Mario Marchetti. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2003.</p>
<p>–. <span class="booktitle">The Letter Left To Me</span>. New York: Carroll and Graf, 1990.</p>
<p>–. <span class="booktitle">Plus</span>. 1976. New York: Carroll and Graf, 1987.</p>
<p>–. ” <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> Light.” Unpublished. [Italian ed. ” <span class="booktitle">Plus</span> Light: Scienza e letteratura.” Trans. Salvatore Proietti. <span class="journaltitle">Lo Straniero</span> 30-31 (2002): 105-114.]</p>
<p>McHale, Brian. <span class="booktitle">Postmodernist Fiction</span>. New York: Methuen, 1987.</p>
<p>Miller, Alicia M. “Power and Perception in <span class="booktitle">Plus</span>.” <span class="journaltitle">Review of Contemporary Fiction</span> 10 (1990): 173-80.</p>
<p>Porush, David. <span class="booktitle">The Soft Machine: Cybernetic Fiction</span>. New York: Methuen, 1985.</p>
<p>Powers, Richard. <span class="booktitle">Galatea 2.2</span>. New York: Farrar, 1995.</p>
<p>Proietti, Salvatore. “Bodies, Ghosts, and Global Virtualities: On Gibson and English-Canadian Cyberculture.” <span class="booktitle">Il Canada e le culture della globalizzazione</span>. Ed. Alfredo Rizzardi and Giovanni Dotoli. Fasano, Italy: Schena, 2001. 479-94.</p>
<p>–. <span class="booktitle">The Cyborg, Cyberspace, and North American Science Fiction</span>. Ph.D. diss., McGill U, 1998.</p>
<p>–. “The Informatic Jeremiad: The Virtual Frontier and U.S. Cyberculture.” <span class="booktitle">Science Fiction: Critical Frontiers</span>. Ed. Karen Sayer and John Moore. London: Macmillan and New York: St.Martin’s P, 2000. 116-26.</p>
<p>Suvin, Darko. <span class="booktitle">Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction</span>. Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 1988.</p>
<p>Tabbi, Joseph. <span class="booktitle">Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk</span>. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995.</p>
<p>Tanner, Tony. <span class="booktitle">City of Words</span>. London: Cape, 1971.</p>
<p>–. <span class="booktitle">Scenes of Nature, Signs of Man</span>. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.</p>
<p>Wilson, Rob. “Techno-Euphoria and the Discourse of the American Sublime.” <span class="journaltitle">Boundary</span> 2 19 (1992): 205-29.</p>
<h2>Notes</h2>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/salvatore-proietti">Salvatore Proietti</a>, <a href="/tags/proietti">Proietti</a>, <a href="/tags/joseph-mcelroy">Joseph McElroy</a>, <a href="/tags/mcelroy">mcelroy</a>, <a href="/tags/haraway">haraway</a>, <a href="/tags/hayles">hayles</a>, <a href="/tags/levi">levi</a>, <a href="/tags/bakhtin">bakhtin</a>, <a href="/tags/toffler">toffler</a>, <a href="/tags/chomsky">Chomsky</a>, <a href="/tags/tabbi">tabbi</a>, <a href="/tags/wilson">wilson</a>, <a href="/tags/american">american</a>, <a href="/tags/contemporary">contemporary</a>, <a href="/tags/fiction">fiction</a>, <a href="/tags/narrative">narrative</a>, <a href="/tags/mcluhan">mcluhan</a>, <a href="/tags/barth">barth</a>, <a href="/tags/calvino">calvino</a>, <a href="/tags/science-fiction">science fiction</a>, <a href="/tags/cyborg">cyborg</a>, <a href="/tags/ballard">ballard</a>, <a href="/tags/clarke">clarke</a>, <a href="/tags/hjortsberg">Hjortsberg</a>, <a href="/tags/vonnegut">vonnegut</a>, <a href="/tags/no">No</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1093 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comHistory as Accretion and Excavationhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/accretive
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Paul Gleason</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2004-08-24</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Published in 1987, Joseph McElroy’s novel <span class="booktitle">Women and Men</span> inaugurated a recent series of long novels by some of America’s most innovative writers that bring the postmodern imagination to bear on significant turning points in American history. Whereas <span class="booktitle">Women and Men</span> most prominently considers the shift in the relationship between the sexes in the 1970s, Don DeLillo’s <span class="booktitle">Underworld</span> (1997) takes up America’s movement into and out of the Cold War period, Thomas Pynchon’s <span class="booktitle">Mason &amp; Dixon</span> (1997) surveys eighteenth-century colonial America on the eve of the Revolutionary War, William H. Gass’ <span class="booktitle">The Tunnel</span> (1995) contemplates the effect of the World War II period on a scholar of German history and fascist apologist, William T. Vollmann’s ongoing <span class="booktitle">Seven Dreams Series</span> (1990 -) examines the conflicts between Native Americans and Europeans, and Neal Stephenson’s <span class="booktitle">Cryptonomicon</span> (1999) investigates code-makers and code-breakers in World War II and the present day. While all of these novels possess the breadth, scope, and length of earlier postmodern historical novels, such as John Barth’s <span class="booktitle">The Sot-Weed Factor</span> (1960), Pynchon’s <span class="booktitle">Gravity’s Rainbow</span> (1973), and Robert Coover’s <span class="booktitle">The Public Burning</span> (1977), they neither reflect their predecessors’ disinterest in character nor their primary concern with using fantasy and, in David Foster Wallace’s words, “rebellious irony” to criticize American society and expose its historical assumptions and hypocrisies (66). These recent postmodern historical novels, rather, simultaneously share their predecessors’ critical stance on accepted conceptions of American history and endorse a new approach, one that favors the individual’s experience of history and its importance as a process of discovery to individual and, in some cases, communal growth.</p>
<p>McElroy’s <span class="booktitle">Women and Men</span> and DeLillo’s <span class="booktitle">Underworld</span> exemplify this recent approach to historical fiction. Both novels emphasize character and the importance of historical experience in individual lives. More specifically, both novels see historical experience as a never-ending process of interpretation and discovery that leads individuals to a deeper understanding of history, its relevance to their lives, and its role in connecting them as a community. McElroy constructs this historical vision in his masterwork, <span class="booktitle">Women and Men</span>, an expansive novel that encompasses such disparate discourses as science, economics, politics, anthropology, geology, meteorology, mythology, history, and literature. Throughout the course of this long novel, these discourses repeatedly converge, separate, and comment on each other, creating the vast web of relationships in which Jim Mayn - the novel’s central protagonist - develops the deeper historical consciousness that ultimately contributes to his personal redemption. Like Jim, Nick Shay, DeLillo’s central protagonist in <span class="booktitle">Underworld</span>, also achieves redemption. But, unlike McElroy, DeLillo treats art and language as the central means by which the individual can link personal to historical experience and thereby be redeemed. Whereas McElroy uses many different discourses to integrate his hero into the web of the human community, DeLillo favors philosophies of art, language, and the artist as hero, with the effect of didactically reinforcing Romantic assumptions about the artist’s Promethean role as prophet and provider of truth and meaning. By not returning to these outdated philosophies, <span class="booktitle">Women and Men</span> provides radical and new insight into the individual’s development of historical consciousness through the intersection of memory and the myriad discourses of information that constitute contemporary reality. Refusing to recognize the central existential importance of the artist, McElroy’s novel is a genuine egalitarian structure in which reader, narrator, and text are equally responsible for the construction of historical meaning.</p>
<p>Both McElroy in <span class="booktitle">Women and Men</span> and DeLillo in <span class="booktitle">Underworld</span> create complex novelistic structures that express their views of history as a process of discovery. As Brian McHale has pointed out, <span class="booktitle">Women and Men</span> at its most basic level is a detective story (233). McElroy holds the reader’s attention throughout the 1,200 pages of the novel by including various mysteries and questions - such as the Chilean assassination plot, the reason Jim’s mother Sarah commits suicide, and the connection between Jim and Grace Kimball, among many others - that he or she wishes to see solved or answered. McElroy also intrigues his reader on a more global level by presenting huge amounts of information on his characters without the structural assistance of a conventional, linear plot. As the novel progresses and this information accretes in a non-linear fashion, the reader must discover for him- or herself the correspondences - or, in Tom LeClair’s term, the “homologies” - between characters (153). Readers must find out for themselves the solutions to their questions concerning the characters and plot, thereby becoming, in a key phrase from <span class="booktitle">Women and Men</span>, the “breather-angels” that help the narrator in the construction of the novel’s expansive universe of relationships. The “breather-angels” are the articulators of a gargantuan novelistic structure “capable of accommodating a multiplicity of small scale units” (McElroy 413).</p>
<p>If <span class="booktitle">Women and Men</span> is a detective novel of non-linear accretion, then <span class="booktitle">Underworld</span> is a detective novel of linear excavation. Like McElroy, DeLillo incorporates into his novel a number of mysteries that sustain the reader’s attention - the history of the Bobby Thomson baseball, the nature of Nick’s secret crime, and the events that transpire between Nick and Klara Sax in the 1950s. DeLillo’s structure quite literally helps the reader get to the bottom of these mysteries. After a prologue entitled “The Triumph of Death,” the subject of which is the day in 1951 when Thomson hit the home run that won for the New York Giants their playoff game against the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Soviet Union successfully tested an atomic bomb, the novel leaps forward in time to the 1990s. From there, the novel travels back in time, answering the reader’s questions about Nick and his relationship with Klara, before it returns again to the 1990s at its conclusion. If we use the novel’s central metaphor of waste to understand its “backward” presentation of time and events, we can see that the connections between characters and events lay at the bottom of a garbage pit that the reader, with the assistance of DeLillo’s structure, has to excavate. Unlike McElroy, who throughout <span class="booktitle">Women and Men</span> sustains a conception of the mysterious nature of the connections between characters by leaving their precise nature unresolved at the novel’s conclusion, DeLillo rewards the patient reader with a chapter entitled “Arrangement in Gray and Black” in which he answers the reader’s questions by directly indicating that Nick killed George the Waiter and had an adulterous affair with Klara.</p>
<p>As previously stated, <span class="booktitle">Women and Men</span> and <span class="booktitle">Underworld</span> take as their starting points what their authors see as two key turning points in American history. McElroy’s period is the 1970s, a decade that, according to him, saw a tremendous shift in the relationship between the sexes. Much of <span class="booktitle">Women and Men</span> centers on the activities of Grace, her feminist philosophies, and the doings of the people who attend her Body-Self workshops in the 1970s. The novel also is very concerned with Jim’s relationships with women and, more specifically, his attempts to come to terms with the women in his life: his grandmother Margaret, his mother Sarah, his daughter Flick, his wife Joy, and his new lover Barbara-Jean. But McElroy’s accretive method allows the narrative to move swiftly from the very specific time period of the 1970s to other time periods, including the distant mythical and geological past of Southwestern America, which he discusses most prominently in the brilliant and beautiful “Ship Rock” chapter, and an unspecified future time when individual men and women will stand together on a metal plate, be transformed into one frequency, and then migrate to a distant space colony, where they will exist as one being.</p>
<p>The “Ship Rock” chapter exemplifies McElroy’s accretive method, illustrating his conception of the integral relationship between history and the way in which individuals have the potential to grow through the development of historical consciousness. The chapter begins as follows, with two unclear pronouns and an unanswered question: “From any distance it is all by itself. But he is not thirty-five miles away now. But what is he?” (198). As the reader moves through the first pages of the chapter, he or she quickly realizes that the “it” is Ship Rock and that the “he” is Jim. The question indicates that the chapter - and a lot of <span class="booktitle">Women and Men</span> - concerns Jim’s attempt to understand himself and his “desire to change” or develop (199). History plays a major role in this development. As the chapter progresses, the reader follows Jim as he contemplates the multiple historical and personal meanings of Ship Rock, which include Ship Rock’s role as a mechanically and artistically reproduced American landmark (there is a painting of Ship Rock in Jim’s motel room), facts about its size and geological past, and its Navajo name (199). The chapter goes on to expand on many of Ship Rock’s other identities: its religious and mythic identity as a “great stone ship” on which Navajos once traveled (203), its personal identity as a reminder of the stories of the East Far Eastern Princess that Jim’s grandmother Margaret told him when he was growing up, its identity as a point of conflict between environmentalists and capitalist miners, and its identity as a reminder of the defeat of the Navajo civilization at the hands of white invaders. Having contemplated all these accumulated meanings, Jim comes to understand that “A truth is that Ship Rock isn’t so alone as it seems” (214). He begins to see that Ship Rock is not only an isolated desert mountain, but also a place where disparate historical and personal meanings abide. Now he can think of all the “women, and men [who] came here with him yet were waiting for him” at Ship Rock (215). His notion of Ship Rock as a collective of interconnected people and meanings is a “discovery earned” (215), one that parallels his novel-length quest to make connections between himself and other people, as well as the reader’s novel-length quest to answer McElroy’s challenge of connecting the various characters, stories, and discourses of <span class="booktitle">Women and Men</span>.</p>
<p>Whereas McElroy finds equal epistemological importance in the many discourses of the “Ship Rock” chapter and of <span class="booktitle">Women and Men</span> as a whole, DeLillo in <span class="booktitle">Underworld</span> favors the epistemologies of art and language. In so doing, he reintroduces Romantic conceptions of the artist as hero into the postmodern novel, populating <span class="booktitle">Underworld</span> with a host of heroic artists and artist-figures, some fictional and some historical, who work in a variety of media. These artists include the visual artist Klara Sax, the comedian Lenny Bruce, the filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, the graffiti artist Moonman 157, and the creator of the Watts Towers, Sabato Rodia. These artists, who all work in some way with waste, allow the characters of <span class="booktitle">Underworld</span> to find existential significance in historical experience.</p>
<p>While retaining McElroy’s emphasis on the individual’s ability to find cohesion and truth in history, DeLillo surprisingly retreats to philosophies that favor the central importance of the artist. But this retreat entails a specific and original caveat, namely that the artists work in the medium of waste. I have discussed elsewhere and in greater detail the artists of <span class="booktitle">Underworld</span> (see Gleason 135-41). But for the purposes of this essay, it is sufficient to elaborate on Klara Sax, one of the most important artists in <span class="booktitle">Underworld</span>, as a good example of DeLillo’s Romantic conception of the heroic artist. Near the beginning of the novel, Nick visits Klara in the Arizona desert, where she and her staff have gone to repaint some decommissioned Cold War atomic bombers and artistically arrange them on the desert floor. She tells Nick that in doing this work, she and her staff express “a sort of survival instinct…to trespass and declare [them]selves, show who [they] are. The way nose artists did, the guys who painted pinups on the fuselage” (77). Klara indicates that the artist working with waste demonstrates his or her individuality and freedom, as well as his or her connection to past artists who were engaged in a similar project. Klara’s artistic venture takes on great historical significance when the reader learns that one of the bombers on which she works is the very Long Tall Sally on which Louis T. Bakey, another character in <span class="booktitle">Underworld</span>, served during the Vietnam War (613). In repainting and configuring this piece of American waste on the floor of the Arizona desert, Klara not only creates an artwork that signifies individual freedom, but also builds a monument to people like Bakey, whose identities risk being lost in American history’s master narrative of war. Klara, accordingly, produces an artwork that microcosmically reflects the unwritten history - or “under-history” - of Cold War lives that DeLillo himself chronicles in <span class="booktitle">Underworld</span>.</p>
<p>Klara’s artwork takes on its greatest significance and attains its truest power when other people view it. At a later point in the novel, Nick and his wife Marian pass over the bombers in a hot air balloon. Beholding the bombers, Nick states, “And truly I thought they were great things, painted to remark the end of an age and the beginning of something so different only a vision such as this might suffice to auger it” (126). The bombers affect the way in which Nick understands history, causing him to recognize that the time when he lives is a transitional period between the Cold War era and a new era, much in the same way that DeLillo’s novel affects the reader. It is Klara’s artistic “vision” that helps Nick reach this conclusion, just as it is DeLillo’s “vision” in <span class="booktitle">Underworld</span> that helps the reader reach a similar conclusion.</p>
<p>Klara’s artwork also transforms the way in which Nick and Marian perceive phenomenological reality. After looking at the bombers, Nick states, “Everything we saw was ominous and shining, tense with the beauty of things that are normally unseen…” (126). The bombers and, by extension, the artist Klara make reality more beautiful and significant for Nick and Marian. The rest of the novel’s artists, especially Moonman 157 in his subway graffiti, Eisenstein in his film <span class="filmtitle">Unterwelt</span>, and Rodia in his Watts Towers, serve a similar purpose in providing characters with a new understanding of their existential and historical experience. Like the artist-heroes of Shelley, Carlyle, and Byron before them, DeLillo’s artists are prophetic and visionary.</p>
<p>Nick’s comments on the visionary or prophetic nature of Klara’s art introduce another theme common to <span class="booktitle">Women and Men</span> and <span class="booktitle">Underworld</span> - that of religious belief and spirituality. In an interview with Diane Osen, DeLillo discussed the Cold War’s “certainties and its biblical sense of awesome confrontation.” The comedian Lenny Bruce, one of the key artist-figures in <span class="booktitle">Underworld</span>, repeats in his “sermons to desert rabble” (586), which he gives in performances during the Cuban Missile Crisis, DeLillo’s notion of the atomic bomb’s religious significance: “the atomic bomb is Old Testament. It’s the Jewish bible in spades. We feel at home with this judgment, this punishment hanging over us” (592). Bruce’s idea is that the atomic bomb binds Americans together in a community of fearful believers. Earlier in the novel, DeLillo cites J. Edgar Hoover as a government authority who recognizes and appears to take pleasure in the atomic bomb’s community of fear. As Hoover contemplates the crowd at the Giants-Dodgers game on that fateful day in 1951 when the Soviet Union successfully tested an atomic bomb, he thinks that “All these people…have never had anything in common so much as this, that they are sitting in the furrow of destruction” (28). Hoover and the government authorities who use the atomic bomb to promote this environment of fear during the Cuban Missile Crisis - Bruce hilariously cites the ridiculously named McGeorge Bundy, Roswell Gilpatric, Bromley Smith, and Llewellyn Thompson, among others (592) - function in opposition to artists like Klara and DeLillo, whose visionary art gives voice to a community of individuals that were once lost to history and inspires them to recognize the beauty of things that they normally would not see. Klara’s art redeems the waste that the American government produces in order to manufacture an environment of fear. It replaces the Cold War’s religious atmosphere of fear with a new artistic spirituality that recognizes individuality, freedom, and historical awareness.</p>
<p>I have already indicated that McElroy in <span class="booktitle">Women and Men</span> does not uphold DeLillo’s Romantic conception of the paramount role of the artist in deepening humanity’s historical consciousness and self-awareness. McElroy is not satisfied with a simple return to Romanticism, concluding instead that vast amounts of information from a variety of different disciplines need to be taken into consideration when establishing a viable epistemology that can be used to approach the contemporary world in all its complexities. In reaching this conclusion, <span class="booktitle">Women and Men</span> fits into the tradition of Pynchon’s <span class="booktitle">Gravity’s Rainbow</span> and forecasts the novels of Richard Powers, David Foster Wallace, and Neal Stephenson. But, unlike these precursors and followers, McElroy sees an elusive spiritual dimension operating in the ways in which different systems of knowing intersect and inform each other. He also finds a spiritual mystery in the ways in which different lives and stories connect in an immense, ever-changing, and ultimately unknowable web of relationships.</p>
<p>The “Breather” chapters of <span class="booktitle">Women and Men</span> demonstrate McElroy’s spiritual approach to information and historical consciousness. After the first chapter of the novel, which describes the birth of a child and proposes an essential separation or “division of labor” between <span class="booktitle">Women and Men</span> (7), McElroy presents the first of many “Breather” chapters, “BETWEEN US: A BREATHER AT THE BEGINNING.” His goal is to present in an initially confusing manner many of the novel’s central characters, ideas, and events. He introduces his reader to Grace and Jim, providing him or her with elusive, non-linear insight into the stories of his two central characters. Beginning the chapter with the sentence, “We already remember what’s been going on” (8), he uses the pronoun “we” to position the reader in the story as an active participant in constructing meaning. His readers are the “angels” to which the novel repeatedly refers - that is, the beings who discover relationships and serve as the “guardians or messengers, vascular go-betweens…” (11). As active participants in the discovering of relationships, these reader-angels have the potential to construct <span class="booktitle">Women and Men</span> as “a community…capable of accommodating even angels real enough to grow by human means” (11). In other words, McElroy posits the act of reading his novel and linking its parts as means by which readers can grow individually while simultaneously forming a community. In fact, the “Breather” chapters, which occur periodically in the novel between the more conventional chapters of straightforward narrative, function as meditative spaces where the reader can rest - or, in McElroy’s language, take a deep “breath” (9) - and contemplate the mysterious connections between events and characters. McElroy’s use of the word “angel” and his construction of meditative spaces are no accident: he sees as a spiritual quest the act of recognizing patterns in a text and a reality that consist largely of accreted information.</p>
<p>At the outset of the first “Breather” chapter, for example McElroy makes many references to history. He is very careful to indicate that the novel considers the twentieth century (9) and, more specifically, the “mid-seventies of the century.” He also points out early on the intimate connection between history and individual lives when he writes of “History passing through [Grace’s] helping hands and voice revealed to her twenty-four hours a day…” (11). McElroy presents Grace’s irreducible relationship with history. As a reaction to the “division of labor” seen in the novel’s first chapter and the patriarchal societies in which Margaret and Sarah lived, Grace’s feminist philosophy forms a point of connection between the novel’s present - 1970s America - and the past. History exists in Grace’s body, voice, and actions - in the head she shaves to protest society’s objectification of women, the radical feminism she espouses, and the Body-Self workshops she gives to liberate women.</p>
<p>It is not difficult to see the way in which history affects a character like Grace, whose political and historical awareness is extremely high. But what about a character like Jim, who repeatedly makes DeLillo’s paranoid argument of history as a conspiracy theory, an unreal text “all made up” by people in positions of power (434)? According to the accretive method of <span class="booktitle">Women and Men</span>, history and politics cannot be separated from individual lives and personal experience. Jim’s view of the textual and essentially unreal nature of history reflects his initial inability to feel connected to his past and to the women in his life. How can he, as a real person, feel a sense of belonging to an unreal past that consists of a host of seemingly unconnected narratives, which include his mother’s suicide, her adulterous affair with Bob Yard that produced his brother Brad, his grandmother’s tales of the East Far Eastern Princess, and his divorce? As Robert Walsh has argued, Jim’s development in the novel results from his ability to connect these narratives and become an active part of the social community (269). This development parallels the act of forming a community in which the reader engages in reading the novel. In having his reader and central protagonist share the same communal quest, McElroy rejects DeLillo’s paranoid understanding of history as a narrative written by powerful men such as Hoover and his cronies to which the heroic artist must respond.</p>
<p>Earlier I discussed the way in which Jim connects multiple historical and personal meanings in the “Ship Rock” chapter. His project in <span class="booktitle">Women and Men</span> as a whole is to apply what he learns in this early chapter to his own life. He needs to discover that he, like Ship Rock, “isn’t as alone as [he] seems” (214). He does this most significantly in his relationship with Barbara-Jean. At the end of the novel, McElroy writes of Jim “taking certain steps toward the girl Jean through the night obstacle course of model edifices capable of accommodating a multiplicity of small-scale unit-memories…” (1177-8). Jim, who appears very isolated in the early “Ship Rock” chapter, approaches his new lover through his memories, which accrete as the book progresses. Jim’s memory is one of the many “model edifices” that the reader helps McElroy construct as he or she reads the novel. This memory consists of many different elements and serves as the structure in which they converge. These elements include the extremely painful personal memories of his mother’s adultery and suicide, his divorce, and his estrangement from his son, as well as the more historical and political memories of the NASA space launch, America’s involvement in Pinochet and Allende’s Chile and the subsequent Chilean assassination plot, the U-2 plane that the Soviets shot down during the Cold War, and Native American relations in late-nineteenth century America. McElroy structures Jim’s memory as a place of convergence to argue that individual lives do not transpire in a vacuum but are always imbedded in history, just as history is always imbedded in individual lives. Of course, this argument about the irreducible connection between individuals and history does not originate with McElroy. But McElroy is radically original in the way in which he does not try to work out for the reader the precise nature of this connection; rather, he uses his accretive method to suggest a mystical and essentially irrational bond between history, individuals, and the world around them. The only way for an individual like Jim to overstep the boundary of self and experience this redemptive community is to approach another individual in the mystical and irrational surrender of love. At the conclusion of <span class="booktitle">Women and Men</span>, Jim does just this in his relationship with Barbara-Jean, thus becoming a final point of convergence with the angel-reader as an active participant in the novel’s vast, accommodating structure.</p>
<p>The structure of <span class="booktitle">Underworld</span> has similar importance as a reflection and constant reminder to the reader of DeLillo’s view of history. But it serves ultimately to privilege art, language, and the heroic artist. In the summer of 1978, Jesse Detwiler gives Nick and Big Sims, another fellow waste manager, the following advice: “Bring garbage into the open. Let people see it and respect it. Don’t hide your waste facilities. Make an architecture of waste. Design gorgeous buildings to recycle waste…” (286). Later in the same passage, he teaches his colleagues how the discovery of means of waste disposal led to the advent of civilizations and “to systematic investigations of reality, to science, art, music, mathematics” (287). Detwiler’s theories may be presented ironically and even ridiculously, but the way in which they parallel DeLillo’s project in <span class="booktitle">Underworld</span> should not be underestimated. The novel itself is “an architecture of waste,” a “gorgeous” structure that very seriously and systematically investigates Cold War America by analyzing its waste and demonstrating how artists can help us achieve a deeper understanding of it.</p>
<p>In my discussion of Klara Sax, I commented on how DeLillo’s artists strive to redeem waste by using it to create artworks that rebel against official narratives of history and thereby promote individual freedom. I have also mentioned how Klara’s bombers reinvigorate Nick and Marian’s perception of reality. Now I need to focus more specifically on Nick and discuss the ways in which his spiritual understanding of the relationship between waste, language, and history leads to his personal redemption and rebirth as a desert ascetic.</p>
<p>Like Klara, Nick at the beginning of <span class="booktitle">Underworld</span> has retreated to the desert, where he lives a contemplative and detached life in the 1990s as a waste manager, perhaps performing penance for his murder of George the Waiter. Positioning him at the top of an office building in Phoenix, Arizona, DeLillo fashions his hero as a kind of St. Antony, one who has experienced the resurrection inherent in the mythological meaning of the phoenix. Contemplating the significance of waste, Nick spends a lot of time practicing what he learned from Detwiler in 1978. He values the Bobby Thomson home run ball - which DeLillo clearly considers as a form of waste (99) - because “[i]t’s an object with a history” that prompts him to think about “the mystery of bad luck, the mystery of loss” (97). Nick’s notion of the mystery of loss is extremely important to his and DeLillo’s understanding of the connection between history and waste. The home run ball attains its mysterious status because it links many known and unknown historical narratives of loss, including Dodger pitcher Ralph Branca’s loss to Thomson and the Giants in 1951, Cotter Martin’s loss of the ball to his father, Nick’s own loss of his childhood and Bronx home when he killed George the Waiter in the early 1950s, and America’s loss of its Cold War certainties and beliefs. For Nick and DeLillo, waste assumes a mystical identity as a reminder of loss.</p>
<p>It is not surprising, then, that DeLillo has Nick approach waste with the care and diligence of a saint observing prayers and rituals. The following sentences indicate the ritualistic care with which Nick disposes of his family’s recyclable waste: “At home we removed the wax from cereal boxes. We had a recycling closet with separate bins for newspapers, cans and jars. We rinsed out the used cans and empty bottles and put them in their proper bins” (102). Nick, in a very physical way, recycles waste with the same care that Klara and DeLillo recycle the “under-history” of individual lives in their art. In the same passage, Nick points out the connection between language, waste, and resurrection when he states that the word “receptacle” comes from the Latin verb meaning to “receive again” (102). Nick’s interest in language reflects his Jesuit education and discussions with Father Paulus, who at one point in the novel asks him to name all the parts of his shoe. When Nick falters in his attempt, Father Paulus informs him that “[e]veryday things represent the most overlooked knowledge. These names are vital to your progress. Quotidian things” (542). According to Father Paulus and his young protégé, language has the mysterious power to make the individual aware of everyday phenomena or, to use DeLillo’s controlling metaphor of waste, to bring to the top of the garbage dump the phenomena to which the individual may once have been oblivious. By using language to discover the proper names of quotidian things, Nick can maintain a saint-like focus on phenomenological reality. He can experience the revitalization of reality inspired by Klara’s artwork and live a life in which he recognizes the universality of loss in American history.</p>
<p>In <span class="booktitle">Underworld</span>, then, language, as well as art, serves a redemptive and communal purpose. In the novel’s final passage, DeLillo enforces this notion when he uses the second-person pronoun “you” to address directly the reader, imagining “the sound of small kids playing a made-up game… speak[ing] in your voice” (827). He returns to the novel’s point of departure - <span class="booktitle">Underworld</span> begins “He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eye that’s halfway hopeful” (11) - and suggests that Americans speak in the same voice and have a common linguistic identity. <span class="booktitle">Underworld</span> itself, with its many American voices and cadences, is a summa of American English and an indication that one can deepen one’s historical awareness only through an in-depth recognition of language. The novel’s final passage moves from a discussion of language to a consideration of individual phenomena on the writer’s desk. DeLillo’s long list of items includes “the monk’s candle reflected in the slope of the phone…and the chipped rim of the mug that holds your yellow pencils” (827). The linguistic accuracy with which DeLillo describes these items adheres to Father Paulus’ philosophy of the use of precise language in raising the speaker’s awareness of quotidian phenomena. DeLillo concludes his novel with the argument that language is a mystical web that has the ability to connect Americans to each other, their history, and the phenomena that surround them.</p>
<p>DeLillo in <span class="booktitle">Underworld</span> and McElroy in <span class="booktitle">Women and Men</span> write historical novels that emphasize the irreducible relationship between history and individual existence. DeLillo’s notion of the primary significance of art and language in making the individual aware of this connection differs from McElroy’s more egalitarian approach to different epistemologies. In its retreat to archaic Romantic philosophies of art, language, and the central importance of the heroic artist, <span class="booktitle">Underworld</span> is a much more didactic novel than <span class="booktitle">Women and Men</span>, one whose structure and characters serve to parrot the philosophies of its creator. <span class="booktitle">Women and Men</span>, on the other hand, is much more radical, original, and ultimately satisfying because it attempts to equalize many discourses and disciplines that may be unfamiliar to the reader. It also respects the reader more than the didactic <span class="booktitle">Underworld</span> and makes him or her an integral participant in the construction of historical and existential meaning.</p>
<p>At the end of <span class="booktitle">Underworld</span>, DeLillo questions cyberspace and considers as “fantasy” its ability to settle differences and resolve conflicts (826), instead favoring art and language. It is McElroy’s great achievement in <span class="booktitle">Women and Men</span> that he is able to create his own world wide web in which all epistemologies - art, language, and history included - connect in one vast system of growth and change.</p>
<p style="text-align:center">______________</p>
<h2>Works Cited</h2>
<p>DeLillo, Don. <span class="booktitle">Underworld</span>. New York: Scribner, 1997.</p>
<p>Gleason, Paul. “Don DeLillo, T.S. Eliot, and the Redemption of America’s Atomic Waste Land.” <span class="booktitle">UnderWords: Perspectives on Don DeLillo’s Underworld</span>. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2002. Pages 130-43.</p>
<p>LeClair, Tom. <span class="booktitle">The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction</span>. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1989.</p>
<p>McElroy, Joseph. <span class="booktitle">Women and Men</span>. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive, 1993.</p>
<p>McHale, Brian. ” <span class="booktitle">Women and Men</span> and Angels.” <span class="journaltitle">Review of Contemporary Fiction</span> 10.1 (1990): 227-47.</p>
<p>Osen, Diane. “Window on a Writing Life: A Conversation with National Book Award Winner Don DeLillo.” The BOMC Reading Room. Available online, <a class="outbound" href="%20http://www.bomc.com/ows-bin/owa/rrauthorinterviews">http://www.bomc.com/ows-bin/owa/rrauthorinterviews</a>.</p>
<p>Wallace, David Foster. “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.” <span class="booktitle">A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments</span>. Boston: Back Bay, 1998. Pages 21-82.</p>
<p>Walsh, Robert. “A Wind Rose: Joseph McElroy’s <span class="booktitle">Women and Men</span>.” <span class="booktitle">Facing Texts: Encounters between Contemporary Writers and Critics</span>. Ed. Heide Ziegler. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1988. 263-72.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/paul-gleason">Paul Gleason</a>, <a href="/tags/gleason">Gleason</a>, <a href="/tags/delillo">delillo</a>, <a href="/tags/mcelroy">mcelroy</a>, <a href="/tags/contemporary">contemporary</a>, <a href="/tags/american-fiction">american fiction</a>, <a href="/tags/history">history</a>, <a href="/tags/historical-fiction">historical fiction</a>, <a href="/tags"></a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1088 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comEnthralled by Systemshttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/basketball
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Chris Messenger</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">1998-07-01</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Of the three major American team sports (Basketball, Baseball, Football), basketball is the only one that is wordless. Baseball is interpreted by language through an umpire’s balls and strikes, football sent into violent collision of bodies by a quarterback’s arcane jargon. Basketball, however, is the sport that at present remains a mystic’s communion, somewhere between a violent ballet and a transcendent praxis. Because of its silence, basketball has attracted only a fraction of the novelists (Updike in his Rabbit series the most prominent) who have memorialized baseball and football in the past few decades. That team roster is large and cuts across a popular and elite sampling of contemporary American fiction (Malamud, Roth, Coover, Charyn, Kinsella, DeLillo, Whitehead, Gent, Jenkins). Furthermore, basketball’s symbology and social relations have been almost totally appropriated by an African American standard of play, excellence, and cultural relevance, stipulating that white American authors must work out their own meaning now in a residual and somewhat tangential sense.</p>
<p>Into this liminal play space comes Tom LeClair’s <span class="booktitle">Passing Off</span>, an example of a critical intelligence adapting a deeply-loved sport to his own philosophic and fictional concerns. LeClair is best known for his <span class="booktitle">In The Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel</span> (1987) which, a decade after the further great DeLillo successes of <span class="booktitle">Libra</span>, <span class="booktitle">Mao II</span>, and <span class="booktitle">Underworld</span>, remains the most comprehensive introduction to DeLillo’s work. With <span class="booktitle">Passing Off</span>, LeClair, in the spirit of the best postmodern copying, has written a lively homage to DeLillo’s fictional achievement. Beginning with John Barth’s essays on self-reflexive fiction three decades ago, contemporary fiction has a rich history of some of its most important practitioners becoming writer-critics both within and without their own texts. Thus Coover’s <span class="booktitle">Pricksongs and Descants</span> (1969) is still a fictional and theoretical benchmark. Such stories as Barthelme’s “Brain Damage” with its dictum: “I could describe it better if I weren’t afflicted with it,” comment most tersely and centrally on postmodern fiction’s tense relaxation into the milieu that produces it. In LeClair’s case, the writer-critic has found the free flow and circular structure of basketball (ball and hoop) to loop perfectly into a meditated view of his major concerns in <span class="booktitle">Passing Off</span> - those of DeLillo as well: the “ecology” which contains both sport and terrorism and which becomes the larger subject.</p>
<p>LeClair is enthralled by system; <span class="booktitle">In The Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel</span> revealed it everywhere in the formal similarities and differences among DeLillo’s systems of notation. LeClair found systems theory to be enabled rather than crippled by linguistic relativity. He stated that the themes of systems theory are the master subjects of literary modernism, namely process, multiplicity, simultaneity, and uncertainty. Thus the connection of these themes across a narrative exchange leads LeClair to find that systems novelists (all of the now-canonical white male experimentalists) “learn the processes in which they participate rather than dictate circumstances,” that they try to understand information rather than cause events to happen (literary <span class="booktitle">In The Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel</span> 17).</p>
<p>LeClair’s master teacher-learner of systems is the basketball playmaker, one Michael Keever, a competent, steady white guard, an American of Irish descent passing as Greek-American, whose career odyssey has taken him to Greece in one more try at chasing the game as a professional basketball player. Keever’s role on the court is to stand in the middle of all systems while he creates within them. Of all major sports position players, the playamker is most analogous to the novelist. No one has more effect on the ensemble or the unfolding game action, no one may influence the individual fates of teammates and narrative chronology as the playmaker who may create to the pattern in his mind. As in the most creative sports fiction, LeClair has found in the playmaker his author manque and indeed the book is “passed off” as “Passing Off: A Season in the Greek Basketball Association” by “Michael Keever,” published by “The Full Court Press.” The game on the court is bracketed within the game that this novel, any novel truly is, creating a narrative where one has not existed before.</p>
<p>On the level of a sports novel’s basic pleasure, Keever has the full complement of the fictional athlete’s empirical jock wisdom. Everything is to be arrayed and displayed against his physical experience. Such rhetoric is one of the last unassailable masculine reserves in our time. At the other extreme, Keever is captivated by video tape for he believes “injected into cartilage and marrow, tape was the white player’s substitute for soul” and that once his coach “put me into tape, “I’ve been kind of disappointed with life off the court” (9). Language seems to be for the times between games when “there wasn’t much to tell anybody” (11). Tape becomes Keever’s mantra and expressive medium for “over and over [he] ran the tape, looped and looped again through the recording, blocking out the words most coaches use for analysis” (8-9).</p>
<p>LeClair thus recreates in Keever’s insight his own from <span class="booktitle">In The Loop</span> to understand processes rather than dictate circumstances. Such is LeClair’s deep structural intimation that runs through both criticism and novel. Keever in Greece is a fine travel writer, observing customs and local mores, taking us into the texture of a foreigner’s contemporary Athens, the hum and buzz of street life. LeClair is surely paying debts to DeLillo in <span class="booktitle">Passing Off</span> for he states in <span class="booktitle">In The Loop</span> that he first went to Greece in 1978 (where most of <span class="booktitle">In The Loop</span> was written) and interviewed DeLillo who was living there and writing <span class="booktitle">The Names</span> (1982), that he “looped back and forth, literally and intellectually, between the United States and Europe, DeLillo’s criticism of America and his love of Greece in <span class="booktitle">The Names</span> ” (xiii).</p>
<p>What saves <span class="booktitle">Passing Off</span> from being a footnote to both DeLillo’s novel and LeClair’s criticism? LeClair’s Keever is nothing like DeLillo’s rather inert James Axton in <span class="booktitle">The Names</span>. He’s more like Gary Harkness the metaphysical football halfback from DeLillo’s <span class="booktitle">End Zone</span> but more positive, less death-haunted. LeClair’s athlete does not brood. Even as he becomes implicated in the DeLillo-like plottings of international terrorism, the machinations of a Greek-American girl fronting a plot to perhaps blow up the Parthenon, Keever intends to control the plays and retain his ability to distribute the ball, to reward himself and punish his antagonists.</p>
<p>The second half of the novel does appear more contrived as the terrorist plot seizes control of Keever’s (and LeClair’s) narrative. There’s a quality of the dreaded relevance as well as a breezy internationalism to Eleni Epimenidakis and her evil agenda. Unfortunately she sounds more like a grad student than a terrorist - or is it that most grad students share pedantry with terrorists? LeClair can’t quite decide (or I can’t) whether he’s doing a send-up of a terrorist thriller or an example of it, perhaps further proving Barthelme’s point. But a forced seriousness does begin to deflate the basketball scenes, perhaps akin to many DeLillo novels which lose their narrative drive but why should LeClair follow his master here? Perhaps because any avowed “systems novel” is not very interested in any pleasures as mundane as pace and closure? LeClair is more effective when he takes Keever on some memorable road trips and depicts his very colorful teammates. There’s more inside basketball stuff for the aficionado than in any such novel I know about; even the minor figures are perfectly chosen. What other basketball novel would exactly reference a journeyman point guard such as John Bagley (56) to make a point (no Isiah Thomas or Magic Johnson here). Thus I can trust LeClair on the minor nuances as well as on the philosophical extrapolations about his sport.</p>
<p>Keever’s wife Ann wants him to want something beyond basketball but Keever himself can’t see it. Even the thermal inversion that hangs over Athens like the “airborne toxic event” in DeLillo’s <span class="booktitle">White Noise</span>, the terrorist plan to de-construct the “tourist site” of the Parthenon, never quite becomes the center of the novel to any purpose. LeClair had written rapturously about <span class="booktitle">The Names</span> and felt it to be DeLillo’s best book, a sentiment not shared by many critics. What LeClair championed in DeLillo: ” <span class="booktitle">The Names</span> first seems to obey the codes of domestic realism, but it broadens to a multinational systems novel” (<span class="booktitle">In the Loop</span> 204) is what he has tried to simulate in his Greek theatre of basketball but like so many other novelists coming to sport in this century, he has not quite believed that basketball could carry its own weight, to stand adequately for what needs to be represented.</p>
<p>Yet at times Keever stands his jock ground against the evil internationalists with only his sporting doxa to protect him. “Athletes are bodies that can’t avoid the facts, says Keever as tough guy-sentimentalist…. When Eleni retorts, “you play with yourselves,” Keever says, “You plot. We play…. We are nature…. We’re bodies and they don’t lie” (142). Such is sport’s empirically powerful answer to a host of postmodern controls from the death of the subject to technological power. The athlete is one of the few people who may use this counter-statement and make us believe in it. His role, night after night, is positively existential in comparison with almost anything else in contemporary simulacra. Keever, playmaker (“protector of the rock”), becomes in LeClair’s favorite pun, “protector” of the Parthenon itself that clings to the Acropolis brooding in disheveled postmodernity over the remains of a logos that can barely account for a befouled Athens.</p>
<p>Finally LeClair has come round to sport via DeLillo, literary criticism, and Greece, completing the loop which began with his own journeys to Greece, his critical principles, and sporting enthusiasms. He would not disentangle this system nor would I wish him to. Basketball in Greece itself is a totalizing view, the individual consciousness knowing itself (“I have my game”) within the middle of something bigger, more sublime at the heart of the West’s origin myths. It’s those moments Keever plays for; LeClair, too.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/basketball">basketball</a>, <a href="/tags/updike">updike</a>, <a href="/tags/sport">sport</a>, <a href="/tags/malamud">Malamud</a>, <a href="/tags/roth">Roth</a>, <a href="/tags/coover">coover</a>, <a href="/tags/charyn">Charyn</a>, <a href="/tags/kinsella">Kinsella</a>, <a href="/tags/delillo">delillo</a>, <a href="/tags/whitehead">Whitehead</a>, <a href="/tags/gent">Gent</a>, <a href="/tags/jenkins">Jenkins</a>, <a href="/tags/systems-theory">systems theory</a>, <a href="/tags/race">race</a>, <a href="/tags/popular">popular</a>, <a href="/tags/elite">elite</a>, <a href="/tags/american-fiction">american fiction</a>, <a href="/tags/america">america</a>, <a href="/tags/loop">in the loop</a>, <a href="/tags/libra">libra</a>, <a href="/tags/mao-ii">mao ii</a>, <a href="/tags/underworld">underworld</a>, <a href="/tags/john-barth">john barth</a>, <a href="/tags/self-reflexive">self-reflexive</a>, <a href="/tags/contemporary">contemporary</a>, <a href="/tags/coove">coove</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator819 at http://www.electronicbookreview.com